Stay on Offense Climb Mountains

Attacking Adversity

Bookish Weapon Number Forty-Five

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How often in your life has your personality changed? Benjamin Hardy makes the case that it certainly doesn’t have to stay the same in his book, “Personality Isn’t Permanent.” A bookish weapon for sure. I mean aren’t they all?

You tell yourself that you are who you are and there is nothing you can do about it. You tell others you are “authentic.” You took a personality test and that’s that. Well, this book will make you stop and rethink everything.

The Case Against Personality Tests

The first part of the book is a well thought out case as to why personality is not permanent. He presents you with stories of individuals that totally changed themselves. He debunks the intricacies of personality tests as myths. Myth number one is that they are personality “Types.” He says these are “social or mental constructions, not realities.” Did you know that personality testing is a $2 billion industry?

Personality tests label you and labels are not good. They create tunnel vision. He quotes a Harvard psychologist, Dr. Ellen Langer: “ If something is presented as an accepted truth, alternative ways of thinking do not even come up for consideration.”

He also quotes Dr, Katherine Rogers, a personality psychologist that said, “We know that personality doesn’t work in types….I wouldn’t trust Myers and Briggs to tell me any more about my personality than I would trust my horoscope.”

Personality Is Not Fixed

I found this section to be powerful. He once again quotes a Harvard psychologist, Daniel Gilbert who says, “Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they are finished.”

Hardy says, “Your personality changes. It has changed and it will continue to change in the future. Consequently, it’s time to start thinking about who your future self is going it be. You don’t want to be surprised, or frustrated by where you’re at and who you become. You don’t want to leave your future self hanging due to neglect, bad planning, or poor decisions on the part of your present self.” He goes on to say that to say, It’s best to make decisions based on what your future, not your present, self wants.” Read that again. Then read it once more!

What to do?

Hardy says that you need to “…distinguish your present self from your future self. They aren’t the same person.” He continues, “The analogy of the future selfs another person may seem like a strange one, but it is rather powerful when it comes to understanding long term decision making.”

“Who you want to be in the future is more important than who you are now. Your intended future self should direct your current identity and personality far more than your former self does.”

Purpose

Hardy thinks everyone should have a massive purpose. “Spending your days on activities leading you to something incredibly important, something you truly value, is how you live without regret.”

He advises to select one major goal and use it as a filter for everything else. “One goal creates focus. Focus creates momentum.”

The author advises us to use a journal. I like that as it is one of my four strategies in “Attacking Adversity.” While journaling he says to ask these questions: 1. Where am I now? 2. What were the wins from the past 90 days? 3. What are the ins I want from the next 90 days? 4. Where do I want to be in three years? 5. Where do I want to be in one year?

More

There is so much more to this book and that is why you should read it. Hardy discusses trauma and how it affects people. Also, the need for a professional counselor when you have no one else to “witness” your feelings. He discusses how to shift your life story so that when you tell people about you it is your future self that shines.

Go Hiking And Love What Is!

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Sometimes I don’t feel like hiking. Like right now I am not looking forward to climbing anything this weekend. It sometimes takes me a few days to get psyched for it, especially after a particularly difficult climb the week before.

What I do is wait it out. Usually by the time hiking day arrives I am ready, but once in a while I’m not. Then what do I do? I go anyway.

Love What Is

It is a matter of accepting my state of mind and believing that it may change once I am underway. If it doesn’t the I love what is.

When you go hiking you do not always have to be ready for it. There are times when you just aren’t. Those times might include snow or rain or hot days.

An Example

This last weekend it was very hot. I climbed to Camp Muir once again. One of the big reasons I climb it is because it is very hard and I believe doing hard things is important. As I said it was hot with the temperature at Paradise at close to 70. Yes, I know that isn’t hot in other parts of the country and world. It was 5:30 AM and still dark.

As I climbed it got even hotter and then wind started to blow. That cooled things down. There is always a crosswind on the snowfields so you have to make sure you have something for your ears even in summer.

Then looking west I see a storm. Rain can be seen in the distance. You don’t want to be caught in a storm on Rainier. Even low visibility makes things difficult. As the storm moves towards me the sun is blocked and it gets cool very fast. I am still on my way up and a long way to go. People I spoke with on the way up said that this incoming storm surprised everyone. Fortunately, as the storm gets close to the mountain it splits in two and goes around the mountain.

So I make it to Camp Muir which showcases even more tents than usual. My guess is that nobody is using sleeping facilities due to close quarters and the pandemic situation.

Coming back down the mountain the snow is soft and that means two things. First, it is safe to Glissade and second, it is easy to fall when jogging. I fell five times, once where it was pretty steep and I started to slide but caught myself.

The good, the bad. Love what is and go hiking!

Go Hiking and Dream Big

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What if you have never hiked a mile in your life? So start dreaming, but don’t be a daydreamer. Take action. Walk outside your door and down to the end of the block. That’s it. It is a start.

Ok, what if you just hate the whole idea of hiking. Fine! You can still exercise. You can find something, anything to get the blood pumping.

Start Dreaming

It can start with dreaming. Planning what you are going to do. Got it down on paper. Pull out all the stops. Now use that dreaming to motivate yourself through what Tony Robbins calls the “Dickens Process.” Have you heard of it? Well, first you look at the present and ask yourself what you are missing out on and how exercise would help you. Then take yourself back into the past five or ten years and experience how not exercising has hurt you. Then take yourself into the future, five, ten, twenty years, and see how not exercising has hurt you. I am oversimplifying this process. The questions you ask yourself are critical, but it works.

Habit

If you want to make it a habit you need to have the motivation, the ability, and a prompt. That comes from one of the three big books on habits. I think it is BJ Fogg’s book.

Make the first exercise you do small. Really small. One pushup. Yes, just one. And after you do it celebrate! Really celebrate. No, not with a bag of fries or a bowl of ice cream. Jump up and down and shout. Feel it. Get excited. Over one push up? Yes! It will reinforce the habit. I like what Jordan Peterson says. He says to make it small enough that you would be willing to do it. Then you can add to it. Two pushups. Walk around the whole block.

Nutrition

Do this with your diet too. I make a lot of noise about exercise, but you can out eat your exercise no matter how much exercise you are doing. I used to run fifty to sixty miles a week, week after week, month after month. However, I ate peanut butter and toast every morning. Not one slice of toast, at least four. Not one tablespoon of peanut butter, but I had it slathered on the toast. I ate fast food too. So I stayed far fatter than I would have been if I paid any attention to diet.

And I hope you like to hike. If not just start small. Go hiking!

Bookish Weapon Number Forty-Three

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Bob Goff’s new book “Dream Big” is inspirational. It actually got me to start dreaming again. Surely it is a Bookish Weapon. You need weapons like this if you are going to Stay on Offense. Dreaming is essential.

The Bible says something about old men dreaming dreams and young men seeing visions. I would say that dreaming big is a vision. Especially if it is something that will captivate others.

Ambition

Goff says, “If ambition had two handles, they would be love and hope.” He says you should grab hold of love and hope and never let go. That makes sense. My experience has been that they are very easy to lose.

His main ambition has been to love God and people without an agenda. I suppose an example of this is him giving his personal phone number out to everybody and then taking the calls.

Who, Where and What

One of the first things you need to do according to Goff even before you start dreaming is to find out who you are, where you are, and what you want. That seems reasonable. He uses his experience as a pilot to explain this and I identify with that because I am I Private Pilot as well. However, Goff owns a small airline so he has a few more hours than myself. When you are landing you need to let the tower know who you are, where you are, and what you want.

That is sort of true. I remember when my wife and I were flying back from Abbotsford in Canada in a Piper Cherokee 140. As we were approaching Paine field in Snohomish County on our way to Boeing Field, a 747 was taking off below. It began to ascend and looked like it was going to hit us. I contacted the tower to tell them who I was, where I was, and what I wanted. I was Piper Cherokee four four four niner uniform, at 3,500 feet heading south and I wanted to know what to do since it looked like I was going to get hit. The tower told me to keep going at tht altitude and all would be well.

Technically when you are above 2000 feet you are not officially under the tower’s authority so once I could see the 747 pilot’s teeth, I decided to do a 180. I told the tower my plans and they wished me a good day. We survived.

Goff says, “An unexpectant life is one that is merely on repeat.” I like that. You need to have some expectations. You need to know what you want. One of the great pieces of advice I read was to ask yourself over and over, what you feel, what you want, and what’s your next move.

Sleepwalking

This part of the book was my favorite. Many of us sleepwalk through life. It is easy to do. It is difficult to realize who the Universe/God has designed you to be in this world. At least it is for me.

Goff says, “I fully engage life and the people around me with love, honesty, and an unreasonable, almost annoying heap of expectation. What would happen in your life if you started to do the same?” He says you need to live in “constant expectation of what might happen next.” That’s very good! Read that again!

So what About the Dreams?

List them. Goff says to get a pen and paper and list your dreams. How long has it been since you did that? Have you ever done it? So do it! Then, “…ask yourself which one of your ambitions is more beautiful and lasting and impactful than all the others.”

“Ask yourself what would make you happy and fulfilled.” Go ahead do it. Don’t just read it. Are there any themes in your list of dreams/ambitions. Anything you keep coming back to? If there are then those are clues. Stick with it.

Goff says, “…your dreams come in three sizes: easy, kind of hard, and seemingly impossible. The size of your ambitions doesn’t necessarily indicate the difficulty of achieving them.”

The author talks about so many more things in this book. Like putting yourself into the “stream of possibility.” Yes, you can do that. And figuring out how God wired you. Being a real dreamer and not a daydreamer. How? Take action.

Go Hiking But Just Don’t Fall

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The possibility of failure is always in the back of my mind when I am in the mountains. My balance has become worse over the years.

Still, that should not prevent you from hiking. It is like anything in life. It requires courage. To accept that you might fall, but that you can learn from past experiences to help prevent it.

Face Plants

I have done many face plants. There are several that I recall well, but the one that stands out from all the rest is falling down Pebble Creek on Rainier. It was before I began wearing Microspikes on the mountain. It was steep and all ice. My legs went out from under me and I tumbled a hundred feet into the rocks cutting my legs and my head. I was lucky that an EMT was on his way up the mountain and he bandaged me up and told me to get to a hospital.

Getting fired from a job is a face plant. I have been actually fired a couple of times. One was when I was selling stamps. You carried this 35-pound briefcase full of rubber stamps door to door. I was horrible at it. Most recently I was fired from a wholesale pharmaceutical company. These failures, just like face plants on the mountain, teach you something each time. I learned the importance of Micorspikes from my Rainier fall and learned about weaknesses I needed to strengthen after being fired. In sales of course, typically you are fired for not meeting your numbers. I have worked for over thirty different sales organizations. Most of the time I was either the number one representative or close to the top. A lot of job changes were companies going out of business or me just deciding I could do better elsewhere.

Breaking Something

Falling can also lead to actually breaking something. Once I cracked a couple vertebra after landing on my back and on another occasion I cracked a rib. These kinds of things go with the territory when you are someone like me who has never been very athletic. I also have repeatedly broken expensive trekking poles.

You can break things in life as well. I broke two marriages and many bank accounts. But once again you learn and grow. Then with some luck, things got a little better.

So get out there and go hiking!

Bookish Weapon Number Forty-Two

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“Falling Upward,” by Richard Rohr is about, as the subtitle says, “A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life.” It is a thoughtful book by a well known Franciscan priest.

It is a good book for people who are in the second half of life and are wealthy enough to be able to partake in all that the second half offers. In fact, it is also an interesting book for those that are just old, but are still living in the first half.

First Half

Rohr points out that we are a “first-half-of-life culture,” largely concerned about surviving successfully. I would add, or just surviving. He says, “We all try to do what seems like the task that life first hands us: establishing an identity, a home, relationships, friends, community, security, and building a proper platform for our only life.” Yet, many, will not accomplish the first half of life in their entire lifetimes, clinging tenaciously to basic survival.

“You need a very strong container to hold the contents and contradictions that arrive later in life.” If you don’t have that strong container it’s tough. He says, “In fact, far too many (especially women and disadvantaged people) have lived very warped and defeated lives because they tried to give up a self that was not there yet.”

Tragedy

“The Tragic Sense of Life,” is the title of one of the chapters in this book. I thought it made a lot of sense. He says that the Greek word for tragedy means “goat story.” I thought that was funny because I have been referred to as a “Billy goat,” due to my hiking. The idea however is that we can grow from tragedy. Rohr says, “It all depends on whether we are willing to see down as up; or as Jung put it, that “where you stumble and fall, there you find pure gold.” “Lady Julian put it even more poetically: “First there is the fall, and then we recover from the fall. Both are the mercy of God.”

He says, “I am personally convinced that Jesus’ ability to find a higher order inside constant disorder is the very heart of his message – and why true Gospel, as rare as it might be, still heals and renews all that it touches.” That is a profound statement and it certainly rings true. Order and chaos are a part of life, in constant ebb and flow.

Second Half

“In the second half of life, we do not have strong and final opinions about everything, every event, or most people, as much as we allow things and people to delight us, sadden us and truly influence us.” What a great way to live! The older I get the less I think I know for sure about anything yet I have met many older men who have set their opinions in stone. Rohr says, “It always deeply saddens me when old folks are still full of themselves and their absolute opinions about everything.”

People who do the second half of life well have combined their occupation and their life so that their “delivery system” is one. He says, “Your concern is not so much to have what you love anymore but to love what you have – right now. This is a monumental change from the first half of life, so much so that it is almost the litmus test of whether you are in the second half of life at all.”

This book continues with a look at the shadow self. Shadow work is a topic in many books these days, but I think this one offers unique insight. So buy the book! You will be glad you did. After all, it is another bookish weapon.