Well, yesterday I gave a class to some students on a professional writing course at the University of Suffolk here in Ipswich. The topic was time management, and my advice boiled down to the following key points:
Distinguish between ‘urgent' and ‘important'. Most things that come in appear urgent but are not important. Many things that are important (like writing the next book) do not feel urgent. Prioritise the important over the urgent.
Create assets. Assets are anything that add value to your life. Value in this case is usually either money, or reputation, or both. A book is an asset if it boosts your reputation, or makes money, or both. (My first book The Swordsman's Companion made me precisely no money between 2004 when it was published and 2013 when I self-published it. But it put me on the map as a swordsmanship instructor.) In the case of the students present their degree would be an asset, as would a blog they maintain, or work they do that can go in a portfolio to show clients. Facebook status updates? Not assets.
Put first things first. Try to get some work done on an asset before checking email or anything else. Your inbox is everyone else's agenda. Your assets are your agenda.
On Monday morning this week I followed my own advice to perfection. I got up and did my meditation, had breakfast with the kids and walked them to school, then came home and produced the final videos for my Footwork course (which is now complete, with students enrolled and everything), and edited some videos for my Medieval Dagger course (which is also now complete). After about two and a half hours of full-on creative and productive work, my computer was tied up rendering video, so I took a break. I did some breathing training, took a shower and got properly dressed… And checked my emails for the first time that day. My creative intention had not had a chance to get derailed.
Back in 2006, in the days just after publishing The Duellist's Companion and right before my wedding, the server that hosted the school website and my emails broke. Five years of emails, my entire inbox, everything, gone in an instant. At a rather busy time in a self-employed person's life. But you know what? I can't think of a single bad thing that happened because of it. Not one. Everyone who mattered (such as my future wife) had other ways to get hold of me. Every important email got sent again by the person who hadn't gotten a reply yet. The wedding went off without a hitch (she showed up and said “I do”. Everything else is a blur). There are two takeaways from this. 1. Backups are important for your important work, but probably not so much for your emails. 2. Very few emails are truly important.
Whenever I talk like this, people jump up and down about how critical their rapid email responses are to keeping their jobs. My answer is in the form of a book: Deep Work by Cal Newport. To sum up, firstly, your job probably doesn't genuinely value your rapid response, they just expect it. Most knowledge workers don't put “I respond fast to email” on their CVs. You can train your co-workers off treating email like instant messaging. Sure, I'm in an unusual position, but Cal is not- he's a Computer Science professor, with all the admin crap that goes with that, so read his book and take his word for it. But you might find my contact page instructive in setting expectations. I'll save you clicking and quote:
Hi! You can email me, which I prefer, or find me online on Facebook, LinkedIn, Goodreads, and Twitter, or if you like, try this spiffy form. Whichever you choose, please bear in mind that I don’t have a secretary, but I do have family, students, books to write and a school to run. This means that I think I’m doing pretty well if I answer your email within three working days, and any social media message within seven. After that time has expired, and there is still no response, try emailing again!
Then, when I reply to someone's email in two days, their expectations are exceeded and we're all happy.
Secondly, do you really want a job in which your primary value is not doing deep creative work, but simply reacting to emails? Really?
Getting and staying out of a reactive mindset is critically important to getting serious work done. Reactivity is not creative. Sure, creative work is often done in reaction to something; protest art, for instance, but the process of creating that art is not reactive, and a wise artist doesn't let anyone see their work until the first draft is done.
This goes to one of the most important ideas for living a worthwhile life: expanding your circle of control. Mr Money Moustache (one of my favourite bloggers) has written an excellent article on this here, but let me summarise it for you. You should spend your attention only on the things you can directly affect. By doing so, you become better able to affect the things you care about. Moaning about politics is a classic beginner's mistake. Writing to your congressman or MP, voting, organising or taking part in protests, standing for office, are all much more effective responses. If you're not planning on doing any of those things, then you shouldn't burn any mental effort on thinking about it. And moaning about the weather? Come on. The weather doesn't care. Either wear the appropriate clothing, or choose to do something else. By paying attention to the things you can affect, you become much more effective and your circle of control grows. Expending effort worrying about things you cannot affect takes away from those things that you can, and you become less effective, and your circle of control will shrink.
What has all this to do with Facebook? Well, 99% of the stuff in my Facebook feed I skip over. Of the 1% I react to, 99% is not stuff that I can directly affect. This is incredibly inefficient. But this morning I found I had checked my email and my Facebook feed before doing my breathing practice or working on an asset. And yet I had just the day before spent an hour being an ‘expert' and preaching to these students about putting first things first.
The thing is, Facebook is staffed by hundreds of people who are way cleverer than me, and whose paychecks depend entirely on making the site sticky. They need our eyeballs on those ads or they are out of a job. They are naturally very, very good at getting and keeping our attention. The only way to win is not to play. Getting off the scroll-scroll-click dopamine drip is very likely to enable me to increase the value I put into the world. Of course I will keep my Facebook profile and pages- they are a useful aspect of my business and personal life, great for organising parties, keeping up with far-flung friends, and all of that. But by increasing the barrier to entry (taking it off the phone), I will only be able to get on Facebook on my work machine, which means after I've done some useful work (because, you know, self-discipline and all that. Lack discipline? Use an app such as Freedom that prevents you getting onto the internet altogether, or blocks certain sites until a time you set).
This is the great thing about teaching. You teach that which you most need to learn, and by being forced to set a good example to your students (because who wants to be a hypocrite?) you get better at the things you care about.
Right, that's 1300 words of creative writing done. What next? Should I open up Scrivener and get to work on the next book? Or dash on over to Facebook and see who's been getting up to mischief?
From Neil's tumblr blog http://neil-gaiman.tumblr.com
Every now and then I come across something that expresses an idea I sort of know and believe, and snaps it into sharp focus. Neil Gaiman’s “Make Good Art” speech did this for me.* You’ve probably seen it already, but I thought I’d break it down into parts, explain why it’s such outstandingly good advice, and use some examples from my own life to show how it has worked in practice.
“When you start out on a career in the arts you have no idea what you are doing”. And this is a good thing. Neil explains that by not knowing what’s possible and impossible, you can break the artificial rules that those that know what they are doing have created, and so you can end up doing incredible, impossible, things that no sensible, knowledgeable person would ever attempt. In my case, move to Helsinki and open a school of swordsmanship. No business plan, no experience running a professional school, not much skill or knowledge of the Art itself; but I had no idea how far beyond my reach it really was, and somehow managed to stretch myself to attain it.
“If you have an idea of what you want to make, what you were put here to do, then just go and do that”. Most people have no idea what they should do, could do, were born to do. But if you do, then pursue it. Neil describes it as a mountain he was aiming for, and so long as he kept moving in the direction of the mountain, he would be alright. This is very like the question I posed in my previous post about How to Plan Your Life. Saying yes to whatever takes you in the right direction, and no to anything that does not, no matter what other benefits it might offer. This takes discipline (some would say pig-headed stubbornness). He also notes that something that you should say yes to in the beginning, because it leads you towards your goal, you might say no to later, because you’ve moved past the point where it is between you and your goal. If you’re in London and want to get to Edinburgh, a ride to York is helpful. If you’re in Newcastle, a ride to York is in the opposite direction. Sure enough, I’ve found over and over that opportunities I would have jumped at 10 years ago, I say no to now because they’d be a step backwards.
Dealing with failure. Neil has failed many times, sometimes through no fault of his own. His solution is simple: only do work that’s inherently worthwhile. That way, if it fails commercially, or in any other way, it was at least worth doing for its own sake. This is an incredibly useful idea, and one I’ve lived by for a long time. My best failures are things I'm still proud of, even though they failed. My worst failures have done more than anything else to spur my development.
Dealing with success. Neil has had more opportunities than most to get to grips with the problems of success. First up is the problem of Imposter Syndrome, which he acknowledges, but has no solution for. It’s just a thing, and to know that Neil effing Gaiman has felt like a fraud for writing stories kind of puts your own imposter syndrome into perspective. I made some critical mistakes in the first few years of my school thanks to the same thing, but that’s another story.
Another problem of success is you have to stop saying yes to everything, because suddenly everyone wants you to do things for them. It’s a hard switch to make, and is related to the email revelation: by answering fewer emails he got more writing done. Think about that for a minute. In essence, he had to figure out what he was uniquely good at, and focus on that at the expense of other things. Productivity is not so much getting stuff done, as allowing inessential things to slide so you can get the important stuff done. (Deep Work, by Cal Newport, is excellent on this.)
“Make mistakes, because it means you are out there doing something.” Less than half the things I try, projects I start, ideas I have, work. But I do a lot of things, and some of them work, and lo and behold, I have a body of good work to look back on. Sometimes the mistakes are really bad, such as when I managed to kill an ailing branch of the school with a single bad email. Sometimes they are merely embarrassing. But you have to make peace with the idea that, as my grandfather used to say, “if you never make mistakes you never make anything”. Surgeons and pilots are excused from this, of course. But by and large, if nobody will die for it, get out and make as many survivable mistakes as you can.
Make good art.“Husband runs of with a politician? Make good art.” This is the core of the speech, and oh my god it is 100% right at every level down to the very bedrock. When shit happens, as shit inevitably does, it really really helps to have a plan. You can’t predict all the shit that will happen, so you can’t plan for all eventualities. But you can determine your core response, and Make Good Art is the best response to have.** It encompasses everything. When life throws you lemons, make (artistic) lemonade. When everything is hunky-dory, make the best art you can. And it doesn’t matter if you’re ‘not an artist’, because, as Neil says: Make your art. Looking after babies is an art. Cleaning streets is an art. Writing really clear contracts, maintaining public order, designing buildings, running an office, creating spreadsheets, whatever it is you do, make it your art. And no matter what happens, respond by making more of it, and better.
One way to know that your art is good, is to do the things that scare you. The things that leave you vulnerable, the things that might fail. And if they fail? Make (more) good art.
I use this all the time, no matter what has gone right or wrong. Especially when some gimp on the internet disparages my work, I just up and make more of it.
This even works when an orange megalomaniac becomes president-elect of the USA. Make. Good. Art.
Secret Freelancer knowledge: “Be good, be reliable, be nice. Two out of three is enough.” This is useful, but it’s one area where I have to respectfully disagree with the master. As one who hires freelancers, you’d better be good, or I won’t hire you, reliable, or I won’t hire you again, and nice, or I will tell all my friends not to hire you. My freelancers are excellent, dependable, and lovely.
And the kicker: the best advice Neil ever got was from Stephen King, when Sandman was doing really well. “This is really great. You should enjoy it.” And that’s really important. To be really good at something you have to be able to see all the flaws, so it’s hard to take real pride in your work. My solution is to put progress over attainment, process over outcome. But also, when the students clap at the end of a seminar, or when somebody brings a book for me to sign, or when somebody says something nice about my work somewhere public, or when I get a particularly good month of book sales, I try to take a moment to acknowledge the moment. To let go and enjoy the ride, as Neil so wisely put it.
There are many other snippets of usefulness in this amazing speech, but my purpose here is not to rewrite Neil’s work and present it as my own; it’s to exhort you to read it, listen to it, absorb it however you may, then put it to work. As Neil put it: “Make interesting mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here. Make good art.”
I can’t put it better than that.
*His commencement address at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts, 17 May 2012. You can and should buy it in print in his recent collection of non-fiction The View from the Cheap Seats. And watch it here:
**It’s one way of breaking the OODA loop. Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. If you know bad things can happen, you’re less likely to get stuck on “orient” (I know people who have lived in denial for years!). If you have a default response, you can cut “decide” altogether. So you end up with “Observe-Act”, which is the goal of operant conditioning training. Who knew Neil was a martial artist?
When my second child was born at the end of 2008, everything went horribly wrong which resulted in my wife losing 7 litres of blood (all of her own and a whole lot of someone else’s), and ending up with an emergency hysterectomy. It was all such a mess that they took an ovary with it. That meant that, once my girls were home (the baby spent a week in intensive care as she was born with an Apgar score of 1. Healthy babies score 8-10; dead is 0) we had a newborn, a two year old, and my wife was recovering from major surgery, after a pregnancy with morning sickness every day for the entire nine months (try puking every day for nine months and see what it does to your resilience), while suddenly going into the menopause at the age of 35.
A difficult time, I think you’ll agree.
So it was no wonder really that about eighteen months after the birth she developed a severe, acute, case of depression. Sitting in the waiting room for five hours wondering if she would live or die was hard. Insisting that she tell me what she was thinking, only to hear that she was working out ways of killing herself, was way harder. She refused to go to a doctor, because she believed that they would take her children away. (This is of course not accurate, not least as there were no grounds to take them away from me.) Tip number one for dealing with depressives: you can’t reason them out of it. Depression is about affect, not evidence. All the data in the world proving that the doctor wouldn’t just take the kids away was irrelevant, she knew that they would, and so would not go. So I had to come up with a different approach. For the benefit of those who may be in a similar situation, here it is.
Own the problem.
Nobody could reasonably say that the depression was my fault, but I am still responsible for my wife’s well being, and her being was far from well. So I had to do something about it. Being a martial artist, I naturally cast the problem in tactical terms. The enemy: the depression. Weaknesses? unknown. Strengths? Unknown, but clearly vast.
Nobody who knows my wife would imagine for an instant that she would ever get depressed. It was not in her nature. But trauma can change everything. And this problem could prove fatal, so there was no time for fucking about.
The first step in every campaign should be:
Recruit Allies
Given that I knew almost nothing about the enemy, the first step was to go through all my friends and acquaintances and gather allies and intelligence. I focussed on women with kids who had experienced depression. A good friend of mine fit the bill perfectly, so I called her to ask advice. And to get a categorical statement that the doctor would not take the children away. (Not that that helped particularly, as people can’t be reasoned out of their articles of faith. But at least I had one ally who had fought the same enemy in similar conditions.)
Next on the list- a doctor. A friend who is a doctor made time for me, and I asked her advice. Her first tip was hugely important: depression is exacerbated by fatigue. So minimise fatigue. Her second was: get professional help (I was trying to!). Her third: look after yourself. This last was especially useful, as of course I was running myself ragged trying to deal with all this, and if I didn’t make time for maintenance, the machine would break and be useless.
Note that these two allies were also spies: people with specialised knowledge of the enemy. So I came away with spies in the enemy camp and the beginnings of a plan of action.
Thirdly I let the senior students at the school know that I would need to take some time away from class. I have the best students in the martial arts universe, and they stepped into the breach without hesitation.
Fourth: I let other friends know what was going on, and many of them helped in all sorts of ways. All of this took less than a day.
Gather Intelligence
The process of recruiting allies, especially my spies, gave me access to a whole load of intelligence about the enemy and how it behaves. I added to this with internet research. But already I had enough data to formulate a plan.
Make a plan, and execute it ruthlessly.
Step one: ideally, step one would have been to take her to a doctor, but she point-blank refused to go. So straight on to step two:
Step two: make more time for sleep. Our normal evening routine has me getting home from work about 9.15pm, then we eat, then maybe watch some TV, then to bed, reading (of course), lights out about 12. It is not easy to go from being at work to being asleep in less time. But I changed our routine, and was fanatical about it. All screens off by 10pm. Lights out in the bedroom by 11pm at the latest. I took over any night-time issues with the kids. This lead immediately to about an hour extra sleep a night (for her anyway!).
Step three: reduce her workload. I took several weeks off work to deal with the kids, and made sure that she spent as much time as possible resting, or doing her own thing. We also agreed to put our younger daughter into daycare earlier than we had originally planned, and not have my wife go back to work. This meant we lost her maternity leave pay. This was going to be expensive, but what is money for? I grew up in places where children died of starvation and related ailments (my father is a veterinarian, who spent most of his working life on aid projects in the third world), so the fact that I could blow every penny we had and the culture we live in would not allow my kids to be homeless or starve, is something that I don’t take for granted, and the conscious knowledge of which gave me a freedom to act that I would not otherwise have had.
Step four: encourage healthy habits. We were already on top of the nutritional aspect; we have always eaten healthily. But I encouraged her to go to the gym, to take Pilates classes and similar, to get out and do something healthy that she enjoyed.
Step five: Professional help. I recruited a friend of mine who is a Chinese doctor (both by nationality and training), and made an appointment for my wife. Local doctors have the worst bedside manner I have ever encountered. They don’t seem to understand that their job is to give comfort to the afflicted- they seem to think it is to tap away at a computer and write prescriptions. For a depressive especially, the feeling of not being listened to is particularly unhelpful. I even arranged for her to go to a private gynaecological specialist, and this dumb arrogant fuck sat there and told her she was not menopausal. She had to break down in tears and demand a hormone test before he’d order one, and when it came back, guess what? Menopause confirmed, HRT prescribed, symptoms improved. This was after the depression had lifted, or I’d not have been able to get her to the doctor in the first place. But my Chinese friend, a professional and dedicated healer whatever your opinion of traditional Chinese medicine may be, gave her an hour of his undivided attention every time, listened to what she had to say, all the while giving her a massage. And not being a “proper doctor” he could not order the social services to abduct our children, so I could persuade her to go. To begin with she was going two or three times a week, and she kept going for some months before she no longer needed it.
Have a backup plan
My back-up plan, if I didn’t see significant improvement in a month, was to hire a doctor to come to the house, and see my wife whether she liked it or not. I can’t make her go to the doctor, but I could damn well make a doctor come to her. Drugs were a last line of defence, and a holding strategy, not a cure. If I had to deploy them, I would have. They bring their own problems, but especially in cases where the depression is long-term and not obviously triggered by trauma of some kind, they may be the only working solution.
We were lucky. The combination of more sleep, less work, and time for herself started working quite quickly, and in about six weeks the depression lifted: my wife came back to me. I could literally see her spirit returning, bit by bit, until she was herself again. You may imagine my relief. I do not imagine that this plan will work with every case of depression- far from it. If someone you love is in that horrible place, you might find this approach useful, is all.
What with losing the maternity benefit, and my wife not working, and the private medical bills, this all cost us a fair chunk of change, enough that it added about a year and a half to our mortgage repayments. Without doubt the best investment I ever made. The fight is not over though; once this animal has tasted blood it is always waiting for the slightest show of weakness to strike again. So I am always watching for fatigue, or the slightest sign of low affect.
It was utterly terrifying to be faced with something so far outside my experience that was threatening my family in such a dangerous and insidious way. God only knows what I would have done without my training. Being able to cast the problem in familiar terms, and come up with a workable plan of attack, was critically important to my mental health, and, I think, to my wife’s.
The system in brief:
1) Own the problem.
2) Recruit allies. You have a support network, use it.
3) Gather intelligence. Find out enough to make a plan.
4) Make a plan.
5) Execute it ruthlessly.
6) Have a back-up plan.
7) Recognise progress, or the failure of plan A so switch to plan B.
One final thing: act fast, act now, and if your loved one can be persuaded to do so, take them to a doctor. Do not for an instant mistake what worked for us as a guaranteed cure. It can’t hurt to arrange for more sleep, less stress, a friendly professional ear, etc., but there is no substitute for qualified medical advice, and if needed, intervention.
The rule of p’s clearly states that ‘Proper planning and preparation prevent piss-poor performance.’ I have found this to be true, so every now and then I carve out time to plan. In the short-term, that’s usually ten minutes or so on a Monday morning to think about what I want to get done that week, or sketching out the structure of a new book. This kind of short term tactical planning saves a lot of time, and is really useful, but it’s not what this blog post is concerned with. I’ve been working on long-term life planning recently, and I thought I’d share the process with you in case you find it useful.
If you had been keeping track of what I’ve been up to over the last couple of years (not that there’s any reason why you should), you would have noticed that there have been a lot of changes. Moving to Italy for three months; ending my regular teaching at the Helsinki branch of my school; moving to the UK. Part of the root cause of all this is that I have been feeling somewhat directionless for a couple of years now, and that is not normal for me. I’ve been circling around the issue for a very long time, and the circles have been getting smaller and smaller. It has taken me this long to get to the state where I can actually figure out what’s going on, and properly plan for the future.
It came to a head two weeks ago, in the come-down from launching two courses and a book within a couple of months. I set a goal for myself to take a full day off, and to do some long-range planning (not at the same time, obviously. Planning is work).
I make my living from being productive (as most people do, of course), and because I'm self-employed, there is a very close relationship between how much I produce and how much I get paid. Money is a store of value, and so it is very very easy to conflate ‘this project will make money’ with ‘this project is worth doing’. I try to avoid taking on any project that I wouldn’t do for free- in other words, whether it makes money or not, it’s worth doing. It’s impossible to predict which projects will do well financially anyway, so it's a good idea to only do things that also have intrinsic value.
Audatia is a good example. It is, from a personal perspective and from the perspective of serving the art, hugely successful. But while I didn’t lose any money making it, it has paid me precisely no money at all (yet!). Who knows, it might take off, or get made into an app and go all PokemonGo on me. That would be nice. I don’t actually mind though, because our artist and game designer both got paid, and I have this glorious little body of work to call mine.
Still, it’s too easy to confuse money with value, and busy with productive, and productive with worthwhile. So I took the promised day off, which meant that from 9am to 3pm I had no commitments of any kind, and nothing I had to do. I chose to spend nearly two hours training, have a snack, and then go for a two hour walk, pausing for a cup of tea with a new friend. This put me into a non-productive, almost meditative state, where I separated productivity from value in my head. I don’t value my children for their productivity; why should I value myself for it?
This was a necessary precursor to the following day, which I again took off in the sense that I didn’t try to get anything done. I could just think, and wonder, and wander, and do whatever. As it turned out, I spent most of the morning talking to my wife. We figured out the following things:
1) the reason I ‘do swords’ is, as I have said many times, because they have the capacity to hook people out of whatever they are stuck in, and into their best, even knightly, selves.
2) there are many other things I can do that would have a similar effect.
3) In essence, what I really do is get people unstuck. Anything that does that is part of the mission; anything that does not, is not.
There have been clues to this littered through my life for the longest time. For years now, when someone emails me for advice, I have usually added at the end of my answer, “Does that help?”. In other words, does that answer the real question, that may be buried under the question you actually asked? I’d never really noticed it before, but now it’s obvious.
The question “does this serve my ultimate goal?” is an excellent tool for prioritising tasks, projects, and strategies. In the past, the question was: “does it serve the Art of Arms?” If yes, do. If not, do not do. If it makes no difference, do or do not, it doesn’t matter. And that has lead me to where I am now. Every single time I did anything just for good business reasons, it failed. Everything I ever did with a pure intention to serve the Art has worked one way or the other.
But the reason the Art of Arms should be served is that it has this capacity to ignite a fire in people who might otherwise remain stuck. I have seen it hundreds of times, and it’s the reason that swordsmanship is a worthy profession not just an amusing pastime.
So now the question I ask of every project or task is “Does this help people get unstuck?”
You might reasonably ask how this is actually applied, and how it relates to planning.
I hope you’ve read Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. It’s an amazing book, and explains in modern psychological terms what I’ve been doing for 15 years. My conscious mind is slow, thoughtful, and limited to just a few bits of data (5-9 for most people), so I use it to consider moral issues, and really short-term projects like cooking dinner or writing the next chapter of a book. I use my unconscious mind for anything that requires managing lots of data at once, such as deciding whether I should put energy into a new book, or create a course, or prioritising the projects I have on hand. Conscious thinking isn’t very helpful for that, because it can’t handle all the data at once. The unconscious mind needs direction, or you end up just following the path of least resistance. If I let it, mine would have me watching re-runs of Game of Thrones while shoving chocolate into my face all day. So I set long-term goals or priorities with my conscious mind, and let my unconscious figure out the details. A bit like an emperor giving impossible orders and confidently expecting his generals to just get it done.
Let me reduce the process to its bare essentials and express it as a set of instructions.
1) Set aside non-productive time off, to clear the buffers and detach from actually getting stuff done.
2) When the buffers are clear, look back on what you have done for clues as to where you are going, and think about who you want to be and how you want to help people.
3) Compose a question you can ask of any course of action. Be as specific as possible, and concentrate on values rather than productivity or external validation.
4) Evaluate any course of action in the light of that question.
5) If there is insufficient data, or too much, then let your instinct answer the question for you.
With a clear direction (well, it’s clear to me at least), I can confidently leave the short-term tactical decisions to my instinct. This makes the nitty-gritty tactical planning very fast and easy.
This is an essential process, I think, to any self-employed, self-directed person. I have no set career path, and no employer or boss giving directions, so without this kind of thinking I would have no way of knowing what to do. But I think it is probably equally useful to others in different circumstances. You have only one life and you will come to the end of it, sooner or later. Once your basic needs are met, it would make sense to plot your own course according to an overall goal or set of values, so no matter what actually happens you can live with your decisions and accept your circumstances because you had a hand in making them. “I was doing the right thing but it failed anyway”, is a very different position to be in than “I was acting on autopilot and it all went to hell”.
Of course it is impossible to predict the future, and there is no way for me to know exactly what I will be working on in a year’s time, and whether it will work at all. For example, the idea of creating online courses didn’t even occur to me until I listened to Ankur Nagpal on Joanna Penn’s podcast in January this year. It took me months of planning, preparation, and thought (both fast and slow) to get to the point when I was ready to hit ‘publish’ on the first course, but it was so clearly in line with my inner goals that the decision itself was instantaneous, and when I make a decision, I act on it. I could not have predicted in 2015 that the idea of launching an online course would even occur to me, so any plan would have left them out. There is no point in planning what exactly I will do in 2017. I have set my mission, and will follow my gut, and it will take me there in ways I cannot yet imagine.
I loathe bureaucracy in all its forms. And I really don't understand why so many companies, organisations, and people feel the need to clutter up other people's houses with pieces of paper that aren't either proper letters (I'm a big fan) or nice cards (also a fan). As you may know I did a major blitz on paper before we left Finland; I bought a decent scanner and digitised everything that needed to be kept (or was just interesting), and binned about 15 years worth of processed dead trees. The only things I kept were either official papers (birth certificates and so on), or things that had sentimental or other value as artefacts (a concert program signed by Louis Armstrong, some of the fathers day cards my kids have made me, things like that).
The pile had grown to critical proportions over the last month, as you can see from this little vlog I did:
So, step one is to make a big pile of all the paper, and put it next to a paper-recycle bin, like so:
One pile, one bin.
Then go through the pile, and sort it into two: keep/scan, or straight to bin. Be ruthless. At my advanced level, I get to split the keep/scan pile already into keep no need to scan; scan; and check with wife, and I also do some sorting into source or type on the fly, because I've done this enough that that actually saves me time because the decisions are very fast. Here's the martial-arty-bit: the difference in reaction time between a single response (on signal, go!) and one with two options (on signal, go left OR go right!) is about a 60% increase. And it just gets worse the more options there are. So at first it's best to make every response binary: scan/keep or straight to bin. The pile is now a lot smaller; and there are actually only three on this table:
the piles.
Then it's out with the scanner. I'm using the NeatDesk, and it is amazing. The stuff just zips through.
Every time something is scanned, it goes directly into the “keep” pile, or it's ripped (to prevent remorse) and goes directly into the bin. And everthing is scanned straight to pdf, the file named, and filed in my documents folder (I use Neat's own archive system, which works well).
Then (and this is a critical step) all the ‘keep' stuff gets put away properly. Because everything is still a bit ad-hoc in the new home, this entailed quite a bit of sorting and rearranging, and in the process I set up the big computer. This meant that a couple of dvds of fencing books got loaded onto it, and the flurry of uploading fencing treatises for free can recommence.
Let's start that with something really gorgeous. Camillo Agrippa, 1553, Scientia d'Arme.
In other news, my course Recreate Historical Swordsmanship from Historical Sources went live over the weekend. It's got about a quarter of its content up so far, and I'll be adding more regularly. The idea behind letting students enrol before the course is finished is to allow me to take their needs and feedback into account as the course is developed. This should produce a much better end product than anything I could just create from scratch. If you're on the mailing list, you should have a 50% discount code; if you didn't get it, then let me know and I'll send it again.
And to recap:
All paper into one pile.
Quickly go through the pile and throw out as much as possible.
Scan and bin what's left, keep only the essentials.
Last week I ran a survey to find out what I should be working on next. This generated a very clear ‘get on with the “systems from sources” online course' response. I am following orders, and hope to have the first couple of modules up for beta-testers next week. I will set it up so that a small number of people can sign up at a big discount, on the understanding that they will let me know what needs to be improved before I roll it out to the public. I'll send an email to my mailing list when it's ready for preview.
The survey also generated some interesting questions and comments, which I have answered below.
1. Your Syballus for level 4 is a bit confusing when you name the drills but give no clue on how they are done.
My response: Yes. The level 4 drills are all on video, which shows you what they are, but they are not instructional videos. This is deliberate: my syllabus wiki is free, and intended as a reference resource for everyone who is following my syllabus. It is not designed as an online course.
2. I live in a small province on the east coast of Canada and have just started taking longsword instruction at the new and only school in the province. The instructors are basing their instruction on Liechtenauer's work. I know you have an add-on for Audatia based on Liechtenauer, but does any of your work focus on comparing his approaches to the ones you use?
My response: Not really. I actually think that the Liechtenauer material is not a complete system; it is part of a system (as Fiore's Longsword material is too). It seems to me that it assumes a lot of basic training on the part of the user; basics that we find in all other sword styles are simply missing from Liechtenauer. I think that the basic material is shown with the messer, with Liechtenauer's merkeverse being, if you like, the advanced course. I don't find it terribly useful to compare and contrast except with students that have an in-depth knowledge of both.
3. I think a book about building participation on a local level including marketing, weapon and and armour procurement and financing, finding a location and course structure and design would be just jolly. Most new students have a difficult time building momentum, and finding practices. This book should be a ground up treatise on how it was done historically, and how to do it today. Just saying…. I have been at it a few years now and have faced several challenges including being ‘Dear John” ed and the ebb and flow of new faces. Might even want to throw in some info about building a facebook group and how social websites can help(I assume that a social website historically was a pub) TY
The online training course sounds intriguing also…
My response: A book on how to start and run a study group or school… hmm, interesting. I might, but there are already some good books on the subject out there, such as Starting and Running your own Martial Arts School by Karen Levitz Vactor and Susan Lynn Peterson. I don't know anything about how schools were started and run in the past (I have an idea, and there are stories and legends, but hard data not so much). Leaving history aside for a moment, a booklet on how to start and run your own HEMA group might make a good instalment of The Swordsman's Quick Guide. Let me know if you agree!
Too many damn choices: 1. Breathing is my top pick because no one has really spoken on it. 2. The community needs a review of how to create training systems when pulling from historical treasties. 3. Really, your next book should be something fun, why I chose other: contact Mark Ferrari who did the art for Monkey Island, add in what you know of historical come backs, and then make a book! Just a thought…
My response: I think I'd better get the course up and running and Breathing published, and Sent, before I think about a comedy project… but I'll take that under advisement!
Hi! I love you books and videos! Great work! I am an AEMMA (Canada) club member (Fiore Scholar) working towards my Free Scholar challenge in a few years, so gathering my armour and learning to move, train and fight in armour. Any future material (books, blog entries, videos, seminars) on all things Fiore would be very helpful for me and our club's students – but especially any insights to help with armoured plays/ drilling and sparring would be excellent. Thank you very much, Aaron Beatty (Scholler, instructor AEMMA Guelph, Ontario, Canada).
My response: Thank you Aaron, glad you like my work. Armoured plays and such are a tricky problem for me, now that I'm in Ipswich and not surrounded by armour-wearing thugs. I think this is one area where the guys who run the IAS might be able to help: Sean Hayes, Greg Mele, Jason Smith, Christian Cameron etc all have a lot more time in harness than I do.
I really need the training systems one as it is basically the only thing preventing me from teaching a class.
My response: OK, so the course would be useful for you; but in the meantime have you read this?
Hello, My name is Wiktor Grzelecki, and I'm a long-time reader of your blog. I also bought some of your books and Audatia game. While I disagree with some of your opinions, I greatly value your materials and input. I like the project about online course, but I would also like to ask you about something different. You are a father, I will be a father in a couple of months. I would like to ask you, how do you keep children safe, how do you keep sharp weapons knowing that your children are near them? Would it be enough to just keep them high enough, that they can't reach them? Or would it be better to have a key-closed chest or closet? Similar to those required for firearms? Or simply to show them wooden weapons, and metal ones with you so they lose the “forbidden fruit” taste for children (What I mean is, could kids be less interested in touching weapons if they got used to them? Something like teaching kids to use bb gun so they don't see actual firearm as appealing.). I understand that this is a complex matter, that would also require lots of time to spend with a child to explain what weapons are and how to use them, but I would like to know what do you think?
My response: Congratulations on your impending fatherhood! Kids and weapons.. This is a tricky matter, as it makes people very nervous. I'll explain how I've dealt with it with my kids in my home, but this is “reportage” not “advice”.
Guns: My guns (two revolvers and a semi-automatic) were always in the safe. The kids could ask to see them any time, though they very rarely did, and I would get them out (hiding the 10 digit combination from them), check they were safe, treat them as if they were loaded, and closely supervise how they were handled. They could play all they liked with rubber band guns and cap guns, but the real thing was (obviously) very strictly controlled. Now we live in the UK my guns are at a gunsmith's in Finland, so the issue is moot. If they had wanted to, I would have allowed them to shoot at the range, under very close supervision, starting with a .22 or something similar, when they were strong enough to handle the weapon.
Blades: Blades are easier, as they are less dangerous (it's harder to kill someone by accident with a knife than a gun), and they are everywhere; scissors, penknives, kitchen knives, eating knives… The kids have been helping to cook since they were so little that that meant sitting on the floor and banging on a saucepan with a wooden spoon. They have been cutting and peeling vegetables since before they can remember. Cutting began with them standing with their left hand round my waist and their right hand holding the knife, with my hand on top. I'd hold the vegetable and do all the actual work. That progressed to their hand under mine on the vegetable, and so on. The only person who could get cut was me (though I never was). Now they can chop stuff without supervision, using my proper kitchen knives (they are 7 and 9).
Until a couple of weeks ago, all my swords were at the salle (I didn't keep any in the house, except for a sabre for champagne). I'd take the kids to the salle quite often, and we would fight with wooden swords, lightsabres, or any other weapon. They could ask to see anything they wanted, even sharp swords, and I would get them off the rack and they could touch them, heft them, that sort of thing, but under careful supervision.
In summary then, nothing is forbidden, but some tools/weapons/things can only be handled under supervision. When my kids were very little, I kept everything dangerous out of reach. Since they have been old enough to understand that some things are dangerous, and also old enough to get a chair to stand on when they want to reach something that is ‘out of reach', we have taught them what needs supervision and what doesn't. Kids are curious, so I've always let mine have a go at anything they want to, while I control the situation to maintain the necessary safety. The idea is to teach them to use things properly, so their skill keeps them safe, not their ignorance. I even let them drive my car. They have never been injured or injured anyone else with any weapon or tool. They will eventually cut themselves with a kitchen knife or chisel, but that's ok; it's part of life.
Creating a card game to teach the basic theory and terminology of a medieval combat system was really hard. Audatia is done though: four glorious character decks and two expansion packs; piled up on my desk they really look like we created something.
When people hear about it, the most common reaction is “wow, that’s cool!” or words to that effect. The next most common reaction is some variation on “but I had that idea!” Sometimes that comes with the feeling “I’m so glad somebody is doing it”, but sometimes I get the impression that the person felt that by having the idea they had somehow staked out that creative territory and were annoyed that I was encroaching on it. An idea that they had done absolutely nothing to bring into being.
The same is true with writing. I hear a lot of “I wish I was a writer”, or, “I want to write books too”. I don’t really get it, to be honest. If you want to do something, do it. 99% of the obstacles preventing you are between your ears. If The Diving Bell and the Butterfly could be written by Jean Dominic Bauby just being able to blink one eye, letter by letter, or my wife’s friend Roopa Farooki can manage two jobs, four children and a commute and still be a successful novelist, really what’s your excuse? Everybody can find half an hour a day to blast out text if they really want to. If they really, really want to. Because it is hard.
And I think that’s the crux of it. Having the idea is easy, costs nothing, and feels good. Executing the idea is often brutally hard, a marathon of sprints, exhausting, frustrating, painful and at the end of it all it might still fail or flop.
I often get what I think are brilliant ideas that I know for a sure and certain fact I’m never going to execute. Here are three.
I had this idea while watching my kids in the Piazza del Campo in Siena. Michaela and I were tag-teaming; she had gone off for a wander leaving me supervising the little artists.
Piazza del Campo. Great place for ideas…The writer's briefcase. Every writer should have one…
And I thought how handy it would be to have a consistent work set-up, that folded away into a briefcase. I was inspired by the idea behind the Roost laptop stand. The key points are:
Easy access: you can pull the laptop out, plonk it on your lap and work, or open the case on a table and have at least your laptop, mouse and notepad to hand. Or you can spend a couple of minutes doing the full set-up with the Roost and all.
Modular design: if you need to take research books, an ipad, or whatever else with you, you can attach additional modules, like MilTec only in nicer colours. Oh, alright. We'll do one in black if we must.
This could be produced quite easily: find a bag designer, raise funds on kickstarter, have cool names for different models (by writing space “the garrett”, “the studio”, “the atelier”; by author “the Dickens”, “the Austen”, “the Shakespeare”), have young chaps with beards and tight jeans rave about it, and you’re over 100k in minutes. Really, luggage is so in right now.
The Tripod standing desk
Continuing the theme of writing set-ups (as my regular readers know, I’m something of an ergonomics afficionado): one reason I don’t like working in cafes and other public places is the utter lack of standing desks with keyboard shelf at exactly the right height, monitor at exactly the right height, and so on. The problem of a stable, strong, and portable vertical support has been solved for decades: the photographer’s tripod.
So how about a light, collapsible two-level desk (keyboard and laptop) that fits on a standard tripod mount? You could even have a tripod pouch on the “atelier” above. The base level would be adjusted through the tripod itself; the monitor/laptop level would be adjustable through how it fits to the keyboard shelf.
A standing desk you can take anywhere? Huzzah!
Genius.
The Bladebell
This is one project that I took all the way from basic idea through first production run, but then it stalled. In short, it’s an Indian club with edge alignment and sword-handling capabilities. They are actually really good; I use mine all the time. I was really careful to get the mass and point of balance just right so they stress the hand like a longsword. You can do all your grip changes, blows, and everything except actual strikes and pair drills with them, as well as everything you would do with a standard Indian club. I even shot some video of how to use them:
I made a couple of prototypes, and got the excellent chaps at Purpleheart Armory to make a batch of 12 pairs, which were sold at WMAW in (I think) 2011. They all sold, but somehow Purpleheart and I never quite got round to marketing them properly so they never took off.
Rather than keep these to myself, I would rather that somebody takes them and runs with them. Go ahead, make millions, and give me a lift in your Ferrari one day. I recently let the url “bladebell.com” lapse; if you want it, it’s yours.
Give away your best ideas.
Seriously. Give away all your best ideas. It’s quite safe. The chances of somebody else having the grit to execute your vision is vanishingly small. And if they do, all it means is that your own execution was inadequate. In these cases, I’ve no interest in becoming a bag designer, writing ergonomics company director, sports equipment manufacturer, and so on. There’s nothing wrong with being any of these things, they’re just not me.
And I think that’s where the idea versus execution problem really lies. It’s in our nature to have ideas. It’s also in our nature to flit from one to the other until something grips and won’t let go. All of the skills around execution can be learned or hired. The one thing that can't be learned or hired is the sheer stubbornness to see it through until your idea is made flesh. You just have to want it and give up whatever needs to be given up to make it happen.
So, if any of these bite you in the arse and won't let go, take them with my blessing and execute the sh*t out of them.
I am not a doctor. And even if I was, I’m not your doctor. If you have any kind of medical issue, don’t get your info from the internet, still less from swordsmanship instructors. Do some research, then go talk to your doctor. Clear?
I dropped 10kg from round my waist, almost by accident. Here’s what happened. I’ll go back to the very beginning, so you can see the process.
In the beginning:
In the late nineties, the metabolism I inherited from my father started to kick in, and without my really noticing it, I had to let my belt out, notch by notch. I got this belt from my sister when I was 21, so I’ve had it round my waist for about half my life. It tells a sorry tale…
See the grooves?
Back when I was 21, I wore this belt on its fourth or fifth notch from the end. By the middle of 2000, it was on the third. Then, after coming down from the mountain and deciding to open my school, I started training at dawn every day, on the top of Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh (I do love my traditional martial arts training tropes). In about three weeks, I lost 7kg (15 lb), from round my waist. 3 weeks later, the weight was back, but round my shoulders. I had to get a new jacket because my old one was suddenly too tight. I was 26, with all the metabolic advantages that gives.
When I got to Finland in 2001, what with the stress of starting the school, and lots and lots of training, I ate what I wanted and stayed skinny. On a normal day, I was training for two or three hours and teaching for two or three. I had to eat every three hours or so, or Hungry Guy would appear and make everyone’s life miserable. The closest I have come to murder was probably when I hadn’t eaten for four hours, went to a Thai restaurant for an emergency feed, and the waiter seemed to dilly dally about getting the food on the table.
I (mis)diagnosed the problem as too-low body weight. I was about 73kg at that point. I ate like crazy to try to put the weight on, but was too stressed and training too much to gain an ounce. Then I met Michaela in 2005, and chilled the fuck out. One of the ways I knew she was the One was that within a few months of meeting her, I’d put on the 4kg (9lb) I was looking for. That did help with Hungry Guy, but only up to a point. I still needed to eat every four hours or so. At this point, my weight was up to 77kg, so I instituted a rule: if my weight got up to 80kg, I’d cut out sugar and alcohol until it was back below 78. Then I could eat what I want. This very often (maybe 5 times a week) included an entire 200g bar of chocolate after dinner, ‘shared’ with Michaela (she’d get maybe one row, so, an eighth of it).
What with one thing and another, by April 2014 I was seriously considering adjusting the rule to anything below 80kg is fine, over 82 cut out sugar and alcohol. (Self-indulgent bullshit is a specialty of mine.) I was at 83kg, and my belt was on the penultimate notch. As you can see, it still has the deepest groove; it had been there for a long time. I had already read Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and Gary Taubes’ Good Calories, Bad Calories, so I should have known better. But sugar, oh, sugar; sweet heaven.
The Slow Carb diet
Then, on a flight to Melbourne, I read Tim Ferriss’s The Four Hour Body. It was the final straw. There was just no way I could justify the level of sugar I was eating, especially given my family history of high blood pressure, my father’s serious weight problem, and everything I had ever read on the topic of metabolism, nutrition (not counting the junk science rubbish that occasionally made it onto my reading list; I highly recommend Bad Science by Ben Goldacre to help you distinguish the good from the bad), health and longevity.
When I got to Australia, I decided to try the Slow Carb diet. Let me summarise it for you.
1) No fast carbs; no sugar, no starch. No potatoes, no rice, no bread, no biscuits, no pasta, no white food except cauliflower, in other words.
2) Eat the same few meals; perhaps half a dozen different dishes.
3) Don’t drink calories. Avoid alcohol, sweet drinks (especially sodas, obviously, but less obviously also fruit juice).
4) Cheat one day a week. On that day, eat and drink whatever you like, as much as you like. But just one day a week.
You can see the blog post that started it all here.
If you think about it, rule 3 is really just the same as rule 1, and rule 2 is a bit boring, and rule 4 should be optional. What I ended up doing is basically just rule 1, and I was reasonably strict about it.
On the day I arrived in Australia, jetlagged to hell, and about to teach a 4 day intensive seminar, my metabolism was still demanding to eat every 3-4 hours. So obviously, I never went anywhere without back-up chocolate. I arrived on Friday morning and started Slow-carb right away, and taught Saturday-Tuesday, five or six hours a day. Up until this point there was no way I could get through a 6 hour seminar without a sugar hit in the afternoon. I’d crash about 3pm, sugar-up to get me through to the end, then need dinner, large and fast.
On the Monday, after teaching for three days straight, I was digging through my bag for something, and found my chocolate stash. In three days of teaching, in the most energy-demanding situation (jet-lag, long days), I had forgotten to eat in the afternoons. I was astonished.
This was because I was not spiking my blood sugar at any point, and so was not crashing. Cutting out starch and sugar proved to be a complete game-changer, because it evened out my energy demands. Please note though that I was not cutting out carbs, only fast carbs. I was still eating about eight tons of vegetables every day, and a lot of meat (the food in Australia is superb!).
Slow Carb, Low Carb, and Ketogenic:
Let's take a moment to define a few things:
1) Slow Carb v. Low Carb. They are very different. A classic low-carb diet gives you most of your calories from fat and protein. A slow carb diet gives you a lot of carbohydrates, but all with a low glycaeimic index, so you avoid the blood-sugar spike. I think any diet that tells you to steer clear of vegetables is fundamentally dangerous.
2) Ketogenic versus Low Carb. A ketogenic diet, as the name suggests, is a diet that keeps your body running on fat. It is very high fat, and obviously restricts carbs, but it also restricts protein. This is because protein is easily broken down into glucose, and so your body will switch back to a glucose based energy delivery system, rather than stay in a fat based energy delivery system (a state called ketosis). Ketogenic diets are mostly used medicinally to treat children that have drug-resistant seizures. I personally would not recommend long-term ketosis, because it is very hard to do in the modern world, and there is no evidence that any human population has ever subsisted long-term on a ketogenic diet (the Inuit may be an exception, but probably not). Ketogenic diets should be further subdivided into calorie-restricted (less than 1000 per day) and unrestricted. The best-known proponents of the unrestricted ketosis diet are Dom D’Agostino and Peter Attia (both medical doctors). Their podcasts and websites are well worth a listen/look.
Bye-bye Hungry Guy
What I was doing in Australia was a not-terribly-strict Slow Carb diet; after class, at dinner, I quite often wolfed down a bunch of fast carbs in the form of beer, and chips with my steak, that sort of thing. But breakfast and lunch were fast-carb-free. The difference in my energy levels was enough to sell me on the idea. But when I got home less than three weeks later and trod on the scales, I got a shock. I was down from 83 to 74kg, and had not once, even once, gone hungry. I ate like a pig, just not starch or sugar. I was so pleased with the results I decided to keep it up. I now hover around the 72-73kg mark.
Most incredibly, Hungry Guy has disappeared. To test this, in September 2014 I decided to see what would happen if I missed a meal or two. I had lunch on Monday at about 1pm, taught class on Monday night, ate nothing when I got home, had one cup of coffee instead of breakfast on Tuesday, missed lunch, and ate dinner with the kids at 6pm. So, about 29 hours of not eating anything. And I was completely fine. Not even that hungry. Certainly no dizziness, or feeling of weakness. Nothing associated with low blood sugar problems. It's also why I wrote “avoid sugar” as one of my top 3 stay-sane-and-healthy tips for modern living.
Fasting
This has lead me to do some further research on fasting; it comes in all shapes and sizes. The simplest is just don’t eat for a while. I would not try that without preparation, if I were you. The health benefits of at least occasional ketosis are well-documented; I think of it as a metabolic spring-clean. But you can fast for a couple of days and not get into ketosis because your body breaks down your muscles to produce glucose. So if you don’t want to a) feel too hungry and b) lose muscle mass, it’s a very good idea to get into ketosis before you fast. Here’s how.
1) Be very strict about fast carbs for a week or two. This gets you off any sugar-high rollercoaster. When you fast your blood sugar will probably fall a bit, so make sure that it’s not a dramatic drop.
2) Follow a ketogenic diet for a couple of days. Use pee-sticks to make sure it’s working. Not everyone can handle a ketogenic diet, so if it makes you feel ill, stop. Try step 3 instead.
3) You can dose yourself with exogenous ketones to speed up the process of switching over. Exogenous ketones or ketogenic foods that I have used successfully (as measured by pee-sticks) include medium chain triglyceride (MCT) oil, branch-chain amino acids (BCAAs), and raspberry ketones. When your pee-sticks tell you you are in a moderate state of ketosis, such as about 2-3 mmol/L, then stop eating. See how 24 hours feels. If you get really hungry, or dizzy, or your blood pressure drops, or anything like that, then BREAK YOUR FAST. With breakfast, obviously. But unless there are some odd medical issues, 24 hours should be no big deal. Just remember to drink plenty of water. Tea and coffee are also ok.
Just to test this, last Thursday I skipped breakfast, and ate lunch at about 2pm. At 11am I had a ketone level at or close to 0. Lunch was a small salad, with a tin of smoked mackerel in oil, and two teaspoons of MCT oil, and a splash of olive oil. I also took 2 125mg capsules of rasperry ketones (Hi-tech Pharmaceuticals brand) and a 6.33g dose of BCAA's (USPlabs “ModernBCAA+” brand). At 4pm my peesticks told me that I was in ketosis at a level of 4mmol/L. Easy enough!
I am currently about 73kg, stronger than I was in April 2014, and my belt is wearing a new groove at notch 5. If I fasten it at the deeply-worn second notch, there is enough room under my belt now for two bottles of wine.
Further thoughts on fasting:
1) I got all of my weight-loss done without fasting. It’s not necessary for that purpose, but there is a ton of evidence to suggest that it is good for you to fast occasionally. Here are a couple of articles on it: one very pro: Mercola and one from the UK National Health Service, specifically about 5:2 intermittent fasting, which I don't do, which is more measured: NHS.)Whether the benefits come from being in ketosis (which can be achieved without fasting), or from the short-term calorie restriction, or some other mechanism, is not clear yet. But it is abundantly clear that throughout human history, we have had to be able to function for short periods without food, and indeed many traditional cultures (including Christianity’s Lent and Islam’s Ramadan) incorporate longer fasts into their yearly calendar.
2) There is nothing inherently virtuous in not eating. It’s just a training tool, like push-ups and meditation. Do it because it generates specific benefits.
3) Don’t overdo it. Fasting gets much easier with practice. These days, I routinely fast for 24 hours with no preparation, about once a week. It does wonders for re-setting my metabolism. After Christmas I was so full I didn’t eat for 48 hours. No biggy. I’m planning a 5 day fast for later in the year; it takes planning because eating meals with the children is a big part of family life. If you don’t have kids, then it’s probably much easier.
5) For me, the point of fasting is to reap the metabolic benefits and to test that my diet allows me to be free of the need to eat for 24 hours or so. I never feel deprived when fasting, so I don’t feel any need to ‘make up for it’ with a stupid blow-out. I do stupid blow-outs every now and then just because I like them, and because my habits seem to be good, I can get away with the occasional splurge.
6) I think that as a martial artist I just jolly well ought to be able to work fine without food for a short time. Not eat for a day or two, and still fight. In feels simply unmartial to me to be slavishly dependent on a totally reliable food source for my effectiveness. An army marches on its stomach, yes. But I don't think there has ever been an army in combat that didn't go hungry at least occasionally.
Some further thoughts:
If you are trying to control your weight, try changing one thing a time. The first big thing I would is add vegetables. A decent serving of green vegetables at every meal will do wonders all by itself to make up for any dietary deficiencies, and fill you up a bit, which will reduce the amount of other stuff you eat. Also, the fibre in the vegetables will slow down sugar absorption, at least up to a point.
Then, the next thing to try is to cut out fast carbs. Cheat once a week if you must, but make sure you are always eating lots and lots of vegetables, and some decent high-quality fat. So fry your vegetables in organic butter 🙂 If this is too hard, then do it for just one meal a day, ideally breakfast.
The scales are a very blunt instrument. You might drop a bunch of weight, and actually be getting fatter, if you are losing muscle mass instead of the lard. I would take waist measurement over weight as an indicator of progress (see that belt?). I would also take all measurements at the same time of day, on the same day, once a week and not more often. This is much more reliable and less depressing than watching your weight fluctuate from morning to night (as it invariably does).
Systems are better than goals (as Scott Adams says in his interesting How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big). If you are trying to get your weight down to a certain point, every day that you are not at your target weight, you are a failure. This is not good. Better to try a different system (such as replacing your starch intake with extra vegetables) and just see what happens. Systems are sustainable. Goals are less so, because when you reach them, then what?
So, that’s how I lost 10kg without really trying. Will it work for you? I’ve no idea. But you can try it without risk, because all it requires you to do is eat lots of vegetables and cut out one type of food that you don’t really need: fast carbs.
And let me reiterate: I'm not your doctor. I believe in trying things out sensibly, and building healthy habits. This worked for me; we have a lot of DNA in common, so it's probably at least worth trying for you. I wouldn't put it more strongly than that.
Medieval scribes had crap posture too! Image from: http://www.booktryst.com/2012/03/medieval-scribes-gripe-about-writing.html
One of the challenges of my new lifestyle is that I don’t have class three or four times a week to keep me to a fitness regime. Before I could make the switch in my head from swordsman-writer to writer-swordsman, I had to figure out how I was going to prevent myself from becoming a weak and overweight lush who was always drunk by lunchtime. Because that’s what writers are like, no?
*Guy ducks and runs away from the many, many, uber-fit sword-swinging writers he knows*
Well, maybe not all writers, but I certainly have the capacity for it.
You may have read about my morning routines for beating jet-lag. I have developed and adapted those for preventing a condition that I will christen “writer’s blimp”. The trick, the key insight, is that this is about developing the sort of habits that will lead to my desired result, rather than coming up with a prescriptive regime. This routine has four steps:
1. Meditation
When I wake up in the morning, I usually go straight into an awareness-of-breathing or mindfulness meditation (guided or otherwise). This lasts from 5-20 minutes, depending on all sorts of things, not least the time. Ideally, I wake up naturally an hour or so before my kids do, which does actually happen about once a week. But one of the greatest privileges of my self-employed (and parental) status is that I almost never have to set a morning alarm. So I don’t set an alarm to be up in time to meditate before breakfast, because if I don’t have time to do it before the kids go to school, it’s #1 on my todo list after the house has quieted down.
2. Breathing
Then I usually do three rounds of Wim Hof breathing; if I’m too late to meditate before the kids come in, then I do this anyway. In the second round, while my lungs are empty, I get up and do some squats and push-ups. Then after breathing in, I do some gentle stretches, push-ups, that sort of thing, guided by how my body feels. Or I might do some of my classic breathing exercises. You know, like the ones in this book.
3. Engage with strength
I usually then do a couple of clean-and-presses on each arm with a 16kg kettlebell, some squats with a 16kg kettlebell cleaned in each hand, followed by a couple of double overhead presses with the 16kg bells, followed by some clean and presses with a 24kg kettlebell. Maybe some Turkish Get-Ups if I’m feeling energetic. This takes about 5 minutes, and engages just about every muscle in the body. If there’s time and I feel like it, I go for longer and do more.
4. Cold Shock
Shower next; for a long time I used to have a hot shower, then finish cold. Then I went to cold-hot-cold, again for several months, maybe a year or more; I didn't really track it. Now I treat hot water as a delicious luxury for when I really feel like it, and so usually shower on full cold only. It is very invigorating.
I put together a video of this routine for you.
5. Paying attention to food
I always sit down for breakfast with the kids, but I don’t usually eat anything. If I’m hungry, I’ll eat some protein and fat (such as half a tin of sardines and a tomato); I try to avoid any starches or fast carbs first thing. (But oh! Peanut butter and banana on toast with brown sugar sprinkled on! Pancakes with bacon and maple syrup! Nutella with anything! I do miss them all, so they are weekend-only fare.) I almost always have a cup of coffee, and sometimes make it “bulletproof”: a chunk of organic butter, a dash of MCT oil, and whizz it with a hand-blender. It doesn’t taste very nice, if I’m honest (if you take milk in your coffee you’d probably like it more), but it does seem to delay the need to eat lunch, and it may help a bit with mental sharpness. I'm considering changing the pattern to eating in the morning, but last-calorie-in by 6pm, to give me the necessary metabolic cleansing time. Dr Rhonda Patrick suggests 14 hours as a useful minimum in this handy podcast. Dig into that if you want the details (and yes, she's a proper scientist). I have noticed that having an earlier eating window makes jet-lag recovery much faster.
When I settle down to work, it often means doing my 20 minutes or so of meditation, and sometimes some exercise (breathing exercises, kettlebells, that sort of thing) first. My feeling is that I need to maintain a solid baseline of fitness, strength, and agility, so that my body doesn’t deteriorate, and I can still do all the things I want to do (like beat the crap out of people with a sword practice swordsmanship to a high level).
Then I start writing. If I’m working on the first draft of a new book (as I am right now), then I hit my word count, and either keep going, or stop and do something else (edit a different book; do some marketing; write a blog post; empty my inbox). I don’t usually even open my inbox before hitting my word count. I also almost always have my phone on silent*, and check it when I’ve done what I need to do. This period of maximum productivity lasts for about one to four hours from about 08.30.
Ergonomics are really important; this is why I only usually work at home in my carefully set-up study.
[Update: losing this study was one of the worst things about leaving Finland; but I'm nicely ensconced in my new office at the Waterfront Studios, at the University of Suffolk. Kelly Starrett has an interesting take on the problems of sitting to much in his book Deskbound]
I’m done working by lunch, which is always very short on fast carbs of any kind, but long on vegetables. The kids get home from school between 12.30 and 2.30, depending on the day, and I try to avoid being buried in my laptop when they’re here. Of course, these days they often don’t want their old man messing up their very important games, so I might do some work or reading in the afternoons, but it’s not guaranteed.
By 6pm, right when I would have normally been starting a class, I’m free! To cook dinner for the kids, for example, have a glass of wine with my wife, for another example. The day usually ends with my wife and I watching something on TV before bed, and it’s usually sufficiently easy watching that I can get of the sofa and do twenty minutes or so of stretching while we watch it. Assuming I’ve been careful with starch and sugar all day, then I’ll usually eat whatever I want in the evening. [I think I need to do a proper blog post on diet and weight control. Hmmm. Ok, done.]
So, in a day when I don’t set aside any real time for training, I’ve meditated, done some breathing exercises, done probably 20-50 push-ups, 10-20 pull-ups (there's a pull-up bar in my office; every time I go get a cup of tea, go to the loo, or am procrastinating, I'll do a couple), 5 minutes of kettlebells, and 20-30 minutes of stretching, and watched what I ate. Any part of this can be expanded without having to create a new habit. In other words, if I feel that my flexibility is suffering, I can extend my evening stretches, and add more range of motion stuff in the morning, without having to suddenly find time to stretch. The time is already assigned. If I think I’m getting weaker, I can add a minute or two to the kettlebell part. For example, I went to the physiotherapist yesterday because my always-dodgy spine started acting up; I've now got some totally specific corrective exercises to do regularly throughout the day… no problem; they are slotted in in place of the pull-ups. If you are interested in the specific exercises I use to keep my arms from going into tendonitis spasm, see my free course on arm maintenance, and my free course on looking after your legs.
I am blessed with a metabolism that puts on weight very easily if I don’t watch what I eat, a spine that produces agonising spasms if I don’t exercise it regularly, and pathetic little wrists that will swell up with tendonitis if I neglect my forearm maintenance for even a few days. This means that I am obliged to keep reasonably fit, or it all goes to hell very fast. It also means that I have had to learn how to do so, or I break. In this case, inherent weakness really has been a virtue.
So, that’s what I’m doing to remain a martial artist while becoming a full-time writer. What do you do?
*Here is a list of the things I might be doing that a phone-call might interrupt. In no particular order: writing something you might want to read one day if I ever get round to finishing it what with all these interruptions; editing video; training; breathing exercises; meditating; eating; playing with my kids; sleeping; bathroom stuff; thinking; writing up my notes; lying on the sofa doing nothing; watching a movie; sharpening a pencil; doing woodwork; cooking; talking to my wife; planning stuff; and that's me just getting started on this list. So, really, why would I want to answer the phone? The chances of it being either really time-critical, or something I really want to hear, are pretty small. Most of my phone calls are scheduled in advance by email, so I know not to be doing something else when the phone rings. Wife, kids, parents, siblings and very close friends get a pass. Everyone else? make an appointment 🙂
I have been meditating in one form or another for about 18 years. Of all the things I do to be a better human, and a better martial artist, writer and teacher, I think meditation is perhaps the most important, and the most effective in terms of time spent to results obtained. This is because 95% of training happens in the brain, and you need your brain to do the other 5% too. Meditation can work like defragging your hard drive, installing a better CPU, quadrupling your RAM, and upgrading your operating system. Only better. There are a dozens of studies that suggest that meditation is good for you. And there are a bagillion pages of hippy crap out there too claiming it will make you fly, or infinitely wise, or good in bed, or whatever other nonsense. Here are two articles, both from major government health organisations: the UK National Health Service, and the US NCCIH, which seem to conclude that it's healthy.
Tim Ferriss has an interesting podcast where he interviews overachievers of every kind, and one thing that they all seem to have in common is they meditate. I've written before on how it can help to manage fear, but I thought I'd introduce it in a more practical way to those for whom it's unfamiliar.
There are lots of different ways to meditate, with lots of different effects, and of course every system claims wonders for its own special style. But really, meditation is about two things: focus and awareness. The easiest place to start, I think, is with “mindfulness of breathing”. It goes like this:
Set a timer. I recommend perhaps 3 minutes if this is your first ever go.
Sit comfortably, or lie down. I like sitting cross-legged on a kicking pad, at the salle, or on my pillows in bed if I've just woken up, or on the floor in my study if I don't want to wake my wife.
Close your eyes, and notice your breathing. Don't interfere with it, just pay attention. if that's a bit vague, try noticing the feeling of the breath coming in through your nostrils, and out of your mouth.
Start counting your breaths, one in, out, two in out, three in out, etc.
When (not if) your mind wanders, just notice that it has wandered, and bring it gently back, starting the count at one.
If you get to ten without distraction, go back to one anyway.
Keep doing this until the timer goes off.
Repeat this every day. First thing in the morning is probably best, but any time will do. I do it on waking.
I usually set my timer for about 10 minutes, or 20. No more, because I'm not a Buddhist monk. On a good day, I get up to about six breaths, sometimes even 10 without distraction, but quite often it goes one, one, one, one, one, one, one two Yay I got past one! oops, now I'm distracted again one, one, one. That's ok. The practice is the process of gently returning your attention to the breath. Nobody cares that you did 10 rounds of 10 breaths without your mind wandering even once. Any computer will do that for you, and better. This meditation teaches you a relaxed, gentle focus. If the timer going off feels like a surprise, that's great. Try adding a minute or two to the time on your next session. Or not. If you can't wait for the damn thing to beep already, that's ok too. Be gentle. And set your morning alarm three minutes earlier. You can manage that, right?
The next stage is to apply that focus to something beyond your breath, such as the feelings in your body. I have used this extensively to help me deal with the feelings that have been boiling up during my boarding school recovery. The idea is that by making space for the feelings, and being aware of them, they cease to control you and fade away. When, for instance, a wave of grief would hit, I would just sit with it, and it would pass. It's also generally useful in that it teaches mindfulness as a specific skill unconnected to your daily tasks. I have recently come across Tara Brach's guided meditations, which seem pretty good. I've linked to her page of basic, beginner-friendly guided meditations, but I personally use a couple of the longer ones. I'm also trying out the “Calm” app, which has a free course of seven guided meditations, which is a really good introduction for complete beginners to the practice.
Give it five minutes a day, every day. After 10 days, if it's doing nothing for you, stop. But I'm confident you'll already be giving it 7 minutes. Or 10. Because it's wonderful.
I'm giving a lot of thought these days to the parts of my practice that are not directly sword-related. Over the last 15 years of being a professional swordsman I have spent perhaps 10% of my training time sword-in-hand. This may seem odd, but as I see it, the sword is just the tool; a drill-bit in a drill, the head of the spear, the arrow not the bow. So I have spent most of my time upgrading my hardware (with breathing exercises, strength training, mobility training, joint maintenance, this sort of thing), and my operating system (with meditation, study, research, interacting with other practitioners and so forth). This makes running “Art of Arms 1.0” easy (though creating “Art of Arms 1.0” has been really hard!). Sword practice, such as striking targets, solo forms, pair drills, fencing, and demonstrations in class, combined add up to only a fraction of the total time. My results speak for themselves; you can google my fencing matches on youtube if you want to see how I fence, or just ask my students.
This is why my book The Theory and Practice of Historical Martial Artsincludes a lot of practical advice on things like nutrition, sleep, and yes, meditation too. You need your body and mind working properly to practice! The book also covers breathing practices, some of which are also a form of meditation. For an in-depth look at my breathing training, you should have a look at my breathing course. You may also find this article from Groom and Style interesting as it goes into some variations of breathing exercises that I don't cover, and gives some background information with fancy graphics.
I recommend sharing this post with everyone you know who is even a little bit stressed out!
