The hardest aspect of going to the gym isn't lifting. It's not the stairmaster. It's not the pain. The hardest part is picking up the damn weight and getting under the damn bar. And Friday workouts suck the most. My last lift of the week is dumbbell lunges and I hate lunges. Right before those … Continue reading Newsletter #56: Pick Up the Weight
Tag: book recommendations
32 Lessons From 8 Years Lost in Medicine
My first book is an arrow shot at a target. That bullseye is a life we love, a life we wake up excited about, and a life we won’t regret.
Newsletter #52: Go Be You
Four months ago, when I leased a booth to feature my furniture, I knew nothing about retail. To get the booth open, I imitated the successful shops around my space, coloring my walls dark because their booths were dark, painting my floor gray because their floor's were gray. As I spent that first week painting … Continue reading Newsletter #52: Go Be You
Before I Learned How Much I Needed to Change
“Fighty, we’re all on the long road back to who we were in high school.” I’ve been sixteen, a football player that blasted rap music from his truck with twenty-inch rims. I’ve been twenty-four, a health teacher and vegan evangelist that ran 5Ks every weekend. I’ve been twenty-seven, a medical student that survived on his … Continue reading Before I Learned How Much I Needed to Change
Newsletter #50: The Honeymoon’s Over
For those first three months after I left medicine, it was bliss. To exist, each day upon awakening, was to be outside of medicine and that's all I needed to be fulfilled. For so long I'd worked for that feeling: to just not be a doctor. Everything was rapture. Beer tasted great again! I liked … Continue reading Newsletter #50: The Honeymoon’s Over
Where the Story Starts
As I walked their trails in my old shoes, it occurred to me that I had no idea, then, how meaningful those years were. I had no sense that a lesson was coming. I was operating under no illusions of wisdom and growth. I was only surviving, taking the next step.
Newsletter #46: To Forget Is To Earn Aliveness
I've read enough by now to know that this is the best of times. The grind. The way-finding. The devotion. This is what people wish they could go back and relive. I've also lived enough by now to know why this is the best of times. The compromise. The misery. The disintegration. That. I don't … Continue reading Newsletter #46: To Forget Is To Earn Aliveness
Newsletter #40: Where We Must Never Compromise
I love The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham, especially the book's introduction. The passage opens with a quote: The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over; thus the wise say the path to Salvation is hard. - from the Katha Upanishad Maugham, a prominent novelist of the 1900s (and interestingly, a … Continue reading Newsletter #40: Where We Must Never Compromise
Five Books I Cannot Stop Reading
The five books I've read greater than five times... because they always help.
Book Trail: Way of the Peaceful Warrior by Dan Millman
When lost to myself and lost to my path, I went back to one book. Over and over. I went back so often, that I successfully dropped it into the ocean, while walking on Maui's beaches, twice, six years apart. Dan Millman's story of self-realization, guided by his fictional(?) character Socrates, has narrated many of my … Continue reading Book Trail: Way of the Peaceful Warrior by Dan Millman