David D. Friedman had a thought-provoking post over over the weekend — Middlemen, Specialization and Birthday Parties. Therein he talks about how specialization and division of labor have allowed for us to cheaply outsource various aspects of our lives that were formerly almost necessarily DIY. Below is an example I can relate to now that I’m living as a parent in my own era of kid’s birthday parties — and note Friedman’s reaction (second paragraph):
Core to the human experience is that we are alive. Living means we are in constant motion. We are dynamic and not static. That is the essence of human being.
I am Justin Owings. People who know me would recognize me not having seen me in years. And while various affiliations and philosophies of mine have changed over the past thirty years, I think of my essence as still “the same” as it was five, ten, and fifteen years ago. How is that possible? How can I be one person at a moment in time (I’m casting a moment in time with this blog postright now) and a different person later (being literally comprised of different molecules) and still be the same Justin?
This metaphysical question is nothing new and as metaphysical questions go, final answers are hard to come by. I’m an evolving, living equation. I’m alive and constant motion—change—is part of it. I am me today as I was yesterday—changed but connected.
That we can change ourselves is an awesome part of the human experience because it means we can iterate on ourselves for as long as we live. For that matter, every next thing you do sets in motion a new iteration of you.
This is the “zen” and power of now. Now determines later. And it’s a small decision now that can lead to a next decision later. Add all these choices up and you can change who you are.
Become athletic. Learn a new language. Be healthy. Build a better relationship with your spouse or parents. It begins (or ends) with the decisions you make right now.
And whether you actively make these decisions or not, you are always iterating. So pay attention and do.
(And watch out for decisions you’re making right now that reinforce behaviors you don’t like about yourself. Behaviors tend to gain momentum!)
Someone will say: Yes, Socrates, but cannot you hold your tongue, and then you may go into a foreign city, and no one will interfere with you? Now I have great difficulty in making you understand my answer to this. For if I tell you that this would be a disobedience to a divine command, and therefore that I cannot hold my tongue, you will not believe that I am serious; and if I say that the greatest good of a man is daily to converse about virtue, and all that concerning which you hear me examining myself and others, and that the life which is unexamined is not worth living—that you are still less likely to believe.
— Socrates
The only means to understand our nature as humans is through doing, paying attention, and honest observation.
Doing, iterating, observing, deducing, over and over and over again. Like the mythical “happily ever after” there likely won’t ever be a time when you finally “get it.” Your idea of what “it is” today before you’ve gone through the trials and tribulations of hundreds or thousands of iterations will assuredly change by the time you finally realize your ambitions. But that’s how you work towards mastery, so acknowledge failure is a given, keep living on the plateau, and work work work.
Understanding our nature is an evolving process akin to the evolutionary foundation of being a living, dynamic being.
It is sometimes uncomfortably personal.
It requires observing our own behaviors honestly. At least as honest as possible. It’s hard calling ourselves on our own biases and half-truths, isn’t it? (It helps to have friends who can be honest with us). Useful observation demands we call a spade a spade, even when doing so isn’t politically correct or socially acceptable.
We’ve got to pay attention. The goal must be kept in mind — it’s not to find the answer but to seek actively that which improves our individual lives.
And what works for me may well not work for you. N=1 is just that. And by the way, what improves your life today may change tomorrow.
Thankfully, if we commit iterating on our own lives, we’re assuredly going to discover a few things that make us better.
Being human is a grand opportunity to experiment. The only way to fail is never to try.
So let’s get to it.
While I was not able to attend the Ancestral Health Symposium last week in L.A. I have enjoyed reading how it went down via various attendees including Richard Nikoley, Matt Metzgar, Frank Forencich, and others.
Like so many others who were fortunate enough to attend AHS 2011, I’m fascinated by diet and nutrition (and largely got into “adventures in diet, fasting, and self-experimentation” via Paleo). However, a comment made by Frank Forencich really resonated with me — and hits on an element regarding the mission of OEM Human. Here’s Frank on AHS 2011 (emphasis and links added are mine):
In general, the preponderance of the presentations were on Paleo diet concepts. Naturally, there were differences of opinion on details, but the consensus view was that the low-fat, high-carb diets of the late 20th century were a dreadful mistake. A string of presenters made it abundantly clear: refined sugars, flour and food products contribute enormously to our modern health woes. Vegetarian diets also took a hit: most agreed that vegetarian diets simply don’t provide adequate support for good health. The scientific data and clinical reports were impressive. I will never look at a loaf of bread the same way again.
Curiously though, the strength of the conference was also its weakness. That is, a first-time observer of this Paleo scene would surely have walked away with the impression that Paleo is almost entirely about food, diet and nutrition. There was no question: diet was the central focus of this event. In fact, the conference might have well been called “The Paleo Diet Symposium.”
This is where I take issue. Powerful as the dietary evidence was, it still came across as an isolated, mono-disciplinary specialty. Several presenters drilled the biochemistry down so deep that I thought they would come out the other side of the earth. And in this sense, it wasn’t really consistent with a Paleo world view. If we know one thing about native, pre-modern cultures, it is that their orientations were inclusive and holistic. Food was obviously important to our ancestors, but they would find our focus/obsession with food to be completely out of balance.
The full range of Paleo experience was simply not represented at the conference. As far as I could tell, there was little interest in the human connection with land, tribe or the animal world. (Refreshing exceptions included Mark Sisson speaking about play and Erwan Le Corre talking about natural movement.)
If you’re not familiar with Frank Forencich or Exuberant Animal, you should get acquainted. I read his book by the same name a couple years back and what struck me then (see the quotes on my review) still strikes me today: Frank sees the big picture and it’s not just diet. Frank’s present reaction to AHS 2011 actually is an echo of a prescient insight he had back when he wrote Exuberant Animal:
“I hear you,” agreed the philosopher. “The specialists have run amok. They do one thing really well, but they can never get to the other side of the oscillation. Fragmented disciplines, isolated studies. One trick-ponies. No one goes meta anymore. Conservatives are tightening the screws at every level. Multi-disciplinary studies are out of fashion and so no one can see the big picture. When you’re a specialist, taking the big view just isn’t part of your job description. and if you can’t see the big picture, you’re not going to adopt a rhythm. More likely, you’ll live and teach in a rut.”
The paleo diet is a powerful tool to drastically improve your health, which is why it gets so much attention. But what is it really? It is but a small piece of an overarching lifestyle — one founded on human nature from the ground up — and not human nature as we want it to be.
Narrow focus can make us blind to the big picture.
The whole failure-to-see-the-big-picture in the Paleosphere reminds me of another audience I serve — the community at BirthdayShoes.com. Here is a growing body of people empowered by simply freeing their feet. Mostly, anyway: how many fans of FiveFingers have actually run barefoot down the street? If barefoot is best, then some barefoot running is a given, right? I haven’t observed that being the case though. It’s hard to step outside and run down the street with naked feet — even when you know you could! Even when you think maybe you should.
Regardless of whether or not minimalist footwear fans have included a dose of actual barefootedness in their repertoire, the reason behind the success of minimalist footwear is that the human form is powerful when it’s natural functionality is exploited and not restrained. This is a big picture idea.
So why are so many missing it? Why are so many getting into the Paleo diet and not realizing that being human is more than what we eat. Being human is more than what we put on our feet. And it’s more than physical movement, too.
Being human is about how we live, our work, our families, our homes, and our relationships.
It’s the big picture.
FURTHER READING: There is no single cause of (or treatment for) obesity by Chris Kresser:
Those who’ve lost a lot of weight on a low-carb diet have a tendency to become convinced that their wife, friends, family, plumber and everyone else will also lose weight following the same diet.
From this personal experience, a belief is formed. And once we believe in something, we have a remarkable ability to filter out any evidence that might contradict that belief.
It takes mundane, often boring, always repetitive practice. And often a whole lot of it.
We learn by doing and not by thinking.
This strikes me as relevant to mastering any skill, and reminds me of George Leonard’s “Mastery” (a bit of a summary of Mastery can be found by Todd Becker, who prompted me to read Mastery in the first place — it’s a quick, inspiring/challenging book).
Watching that video reminds me of how I “became an artist.” I did a lot of art/cartooning as a kid and people would say to me, “You’re talented.” Being an artist was then, and still is today, looked at as some sort of “gift” bestowed from the heavens (and or my genetics). I’ve never believed this personally though.
How I became an artist was much simpler: I kept trying to copy the cartoon image of Super Mario over and over and over again, doing it better and better each time. I remember doing it 20-30 times one night for my classmates in maybe 1st grade. What I didn’t realize at the time was that I was inadvertently practicing how to copy something I saw with my eyes and put it down onto paper. Without any prompting or structured learning from parents or teachers, I trained myself as a five or six year old to draw cartoons.
This is the lunchbox that made me an artist:
This is how we learn: practice, perseverance, stumbling, and trial and error.
Below was originally published on OEMHuman.com. Though OEM was a short-lived project, I am keeping the content alive here for the sake of posterity.
The seeds for OEM Human were planted a long time ago. And like any idea, OEM Human continues to evolve. Below is a bit of the history behind the evolution thus far. It’s an evolution of my own perspective — my personal goal to understand “how things work.” Human beings are social beings that create economic and political structures, we’re animals with biological needs and requirements, and we have organic, dynamic, living minds. These characteristics (and others, as well) go towards defining our existence in fundamental ways.
I hope you will join me in striving to understand and improve our human existence.
OEM Human is the result of an insatiable itch to comprehend the complexities of human social constructs — the human element driving economics, politics, and social structures. This led me to create sites like the (somewhat busted and defunct) autoDogmatic.com, which focused heavily on individualist, anarchistic inspired political views, and ultimately resulted in spending a few years breaking news at the “ground zero” of the 2008 credit crisis through the “Implode-O-Meter” media franchise.
I suppose it was only a matter of time before this work felt like little more than “Folk activism” — preaching to the choir with no clear goal in mind.
I took interest in the world of health and nutrition. Rather than simply being an academic, theoretical study, learnings in health and nutrition were immediately applicable and testable. Soon, I was “self-experimenting.” My experiments began with intermittent fasting (“IF”) and a “paleo” diet, which included a heavy dose of (perhaps misguided) low-carb eating. My health improved markedly and I was quickly hooked on the notion of applying lifestyle “hacks” to feel better, look better, and be measurably healthier. It didn’t (hasn’t) stop there.
Most recently I’ve experimented with IF and weight training cast against a time-sensitive macronutrient composition (LeanGains). Even more recently I’ve honed in on “flavor associations” as they drive a settling point through brain-food associations. The recent series by Stephan Guyenet and the lucid analysis by Todd Becker on flavor control and conditioning have been particularly helpful.
Beyond nutrition, what of the bone and brawn that make me strong? I’ve experimented with movements like CrossFit and being an iron-swinging, kettlebell snatching “comrade.” I’m indebted to the works of Erwan LeCorre of MovNat and Frank Forencich of Exuberant Animal. Mark Sisson of the Primal Blueprint is an ongoing source of information on both fitness and nutrition — and the individual who turned me onto toe shoes, which led to connect to the growing community of those who believe less (shoe) is more — our feet function fine on their own, thank you very much!
The things I’ve learned along the way could fill volumes and I’ve forgotten much. There’s just so much to know and understand. So much still to learn!
Along the way I’ve learned about the human psyche and how we “stumble” on happiness, how we advance more by doing than thinking, and the empowering human capacity for reprogramming how we think and do. I’ve learned of the fallibility of the human narrative and the tendency to overstate control and misunderstand even our most private desires.
The more I learn the more I realize I don’t know.
I am human.
Along the way I’ve met many like-minded folk. I’ve learned much from these fellow travelers and as I’ve taken my fill of knowledge, I’ve found a growing desire to give back through sharing and spreading the things I’ve learned.
Because the discussion lives in the individuals around the world who are actively making changes in their own lives, what if I created a place where these stories could be shared? What if by aggregating these stories and advocating on behalf of the core ideas that bind us together as human, I could create something that would inspire others to rethink their own nature, and how that nature fits with a modern life?
So last night I made a meatza for the second time. For those of you who’ve not had or heard of a meatza, it’s basically a pizza you make using ground beef for the crust.
I consider myself pretty carnivorous and I love pizza (Pizza and beer are make for the one-two punch to knock me completely off the paleo bandwagon*), but I have to confess: the notion of a meatza just didn’t appeal to me at first blush. Plus, I’d made a few attempts at the almond flour crust pizza and been a bit disappointed. It’s a lot of work to make an almond flour pizza, so when the result consistently disappointed, I just gave up on a low-carb pizza solution.
It was only when a few friends mentioned they had enjoyed meatza that I decided to give it a shot. I knew Richard had made meatza based off a meatza recipe from the Healthy Cooking Coach, so that’s where I scrounged up the basic directions.
Now, making a pizza is as simple as making a crust, adding toppings, and baking it in the oven. With a meatza then, the most complicated part here is making the crust. And it’s also the part that you’ve got to get right to make sure your meat pizza is delicious!
Enter my Italian grandfather’s meatball recipe. My Pop has a fairly famous (within the family anyway) spaghetti recipe for sauce and meatballs. I’m going to skip the sauce part for now because it’s a bit more labor-intensive. In a pinch, you can just use some spaghetti sauce from the store.
Anyway, it’s the meatball recipe that really knocks the meatza crust out of the park, so without further ado, here are the ingredients:
At this point, I immediately start pre-cooking certain ingredients that need a little extra attention; in my case, it’s sliced mushrooms and diced green pepper sauteeing in a cast iron skillet with some pasture butter.
Ten minutes up, take the crust out of the oven. Set the oven to Broil (it will take a few minutes to heat to this point).
You’ll now notice the crust has shrunk considerably and there’s a good bit of rendered fat in the pan. Pour the fat out of the pan. Optional step: take a paper towel and wipe up any extraneous beef “stuff” that is exterior to the crust. This is simply because it’s not part of the crust and if you leave it, it could cake to the pan and make clean-up more of a hassle.
Now, you just add your toppings. For me, I added Newman’s Sockerooni spaghetti sauce as a base, then a layer of pepperoni, then a base layer of mozarella cheese. From there, I add sliced green olives, feta cheese, the mushrooms and green peppers, more pepperoni, and top it all off with more cheese.
Broiler heated up, I throw it all back in the oven until the cheese is done. It cooks very fast at this point! Like five minutes is almost too long in our case, so make sure you keep a close eye on your meatza!
Take it out, let it sit for a minute or two, and slice and serve. I find this slices into six solid size pieces — I can eat a half a pizza under the right conditions, but one slice of meatza and I am good to go.
Enjoy!
Oh one more thing: I really like this alternative pizza combination. It is downright delicious and I don’t get that “sigh this isn’t really pizza” sensation at all. I’m not sure it is pizza, really, but it is really good, so who cares!
* Beer, chips, and salsa at Mexican restaurants being right up there, too.
** Were you to make the meatballs, you’d actually use two slices of bread, wet, and torn into small pieces OR 1 cup of plain bread crumbs (you can sub almond flour if you like)
Originally posted this review on Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run on birthdayshoes.com.
I challenge anyone to read Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen and not be inspired—to run, to be healthy, to be, well just, better.
Born to Run is about McDougall’s investigative adventure into the world of running, ultramarathons, the shoe industry, and the Tarahumara Indians, a seclusive group of “superathletes” known for their running endurance and speed. The tale begins with a question, “How come my foot hurts?” and ends with a race between a few elite ultrarunners and the Tarahumara Indians in the Copper Canyons of Mexico. In between are a number of answers, questions, and challenges.
It was difficult to put Born to Run down. The book is simultaneously thrilling and informative. It not only recaptures the excitement of past distance running races (like the 1995 Leadville 100), but it also tells the backstories of BtR‘s protagonists — Ann Trason, Ken Chlouber, Caballo Blanco (or “Micah True”), “Barefoot Ted” McDonald, Scott Jurek, Jenn “Mookie” Shelton and Billy “Bonehead” Barnett. Even still, the book serves as an indictment of the running shoe industry, specifically Nike, while also laying out a compelling case that human beings evolved to be runners—chasing prey down, out-enduring them via the persistence hunt. At under 300 pages Born to Run, like the runners and races it describes, covers a lot of ground quickly.
Perhaps one of the most inspirational paragraphs from Born to Run contains the book’s title:
Distance running was revered because it was indispensable; it was the way we survived and thrived and spread across the planet. You ran to eat and to avoid being eaten; you ran to find a mate and impress her, and with her you ran off to start a new life together. You had to love running, or you wouldn’t live to love anything else. And like everything else we love—everything we sentimentally call our “passions” and “desires”—it’s really an encoded ancestral necessity. We were born to run; we were born because we run. We’re all Running People, as the Tarahumara have always known.
Born to Run is one of those rare books that captures within its pages an authentic human experience and conveys that experience directly to the reader. It’s a book in which you are awed by superhuman athletes while still seeing their core humanity. And therein is one of McDougall’s primary takeaways: every human being was born to run, the design being coded within our DNA.
Since this book review is for the Vibram fivefingers fan community, I’d be remiss not to note that BtR gives a hearty mention regarding VFFs, specifically via Barefoot Ted, who apparently inspired Vibram USA’s CEO, Tony Post, to go for a run in his fivefingers. I’m guessing this was back in early 2006. “El Mono” (Barefoot Ted) also made use of his fivefingers at various times during his trek to race with the Tarahumara. And as previously noted on this site, Christopher McDougall seems to enjoy his fivefingers for running these days, too.
Conclusion: BtR is a fantastic read, and I whole-heartedly recommend it. More than anything, I expect this book to spawn the next generation of runners, and I’m optimistic that it will take barefooting (or pseudo-barefooting/minimalist footwear) mainstream. Born to Run is yet another step in a more general movement towards acquiring a higher understanding of what it means and requires to be human.
Thank you to Christopher McDougall for telling this tale: it needed to be told!
If you’d like to snag Born to Run, just click this link to pick it up from Amazon.com.
I read Exuberant Animal by Frank Forencich whilst vacationing in Jamaica and am just now (Actual date, not finish date per this review is July 9, 2009!) getting to review it. I’m going to have to limit my review to a few quotes that I enjoyed from the book, the first of which is one that actually describes the structure of the book:
Being bushy by nature, this book will not give you a linear, step-by-step formula for health and fitness success. IT won’t provide you with a prescription or a checklist. It won’t reveal a secret antidote for aging or a breakthrough discovery for instant weight loss. Instead, this bushy material will open your mind to new possibilities, relationships and ideas that you can adapt to suite your own purposes. Most importantly, the ideas in this book will help you develop a sense of depth and sustainability in your life of physical movement. You’ll begin to realize that the world of the body is far more than one of sets, reps and calories. It is immensely rich and endlessly fascinating-an ideal life-long study.
About two paragraphs up from this one was the following great sentence:
“Specializations have their place, but they inevitably lead to fragmentation.”
I couldn’t agree more. And Exuberant Animal takes you on a “bushy,” generalist route through the mind and body. Each chapter essentially stands alone, so the book reads a bit like a series of articles. It’s a great primer for anyone interested in getting back to the core of being human — a core that is fundamentally animalistic, and, well, exuberant!
Another quote I liked from a chapter titled “Learning learning:”
“I hear you,” agreed the philosopher. “The specialists have run amok. They do one thing really well, but they can never get to the other side of the oscillation. Fragmented disciplines, isolated studies. One trick-ponies. No one goes meta anymore. Conservatives are tightening the screws at every level. Multi-disciplinary studies are out of fashion and so no one can see the big picture. When you’re a specialist, taking the big view just isn’t part of your job description. and if you can’t see the big picture, you’re not going to adopt a rhythm. More likely, you’ll live and teach in a rut.”
And finally a quote from a chapter titled “Stop Drawing Horses:”
Find out your awkwardness. Figure out what you’re good at and then—Just Do the Opposite. Go towards your awkwardness, go towards your fear, go towards your instability, your errors and your ignorance.
All “bushy” quotes, no?
There’s a lot more in this book, and I’m giving this review short shrift simply because if I don’t get it out there, I’ll never get it up. If you’re at all interested in getting in touch with your humanity, I recommend picking up Exuberant Animal, a book about a holistic, mind-body life philosophy.
Frank Forencich has been at the forefront of the movement for humans to get in touch with their nature, and if you just want to plug in to what’s up to, be sure to check out his website:
http://www.exuberantanimal.com/
I picked up a used copy (the book is out of print) of Constructive Living by David Reynolds after reading a comment from James Hogan on Patri Friedman’s livejournal.
The book bills itself on the cover: “Outgrow shyness, depression, fear, stress, grief, chronic pain. Achieve the goal of Constructive Living—to do everything well.
At around 100 pages in length, the book is a quick read that essentially admonishes you to act your way into a better life. In keeping with my fascination/recent obsession with doing over thinking as well as Glasser’s Control Theory and Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness, CL was right up my alley.
Part of CL is about paying attention to your life. To some extent, it seems a bit like a “living in the moment” sort of mantra; however, I think the idea is much more poignant/specific than that. If I could sum up CL in one sentence, I’d clumsily suggest that constructive living is “Acknowledging your feelings and then taking control of what you are doing.”
It’s in the doing that you can outgrow your feelings. There’s a maxim somewhere in the book that has managed to stick in my brain:
“Doing wags the tail of feelings.”
To elaborate somewhat on this quote, we can’t control our feelings. And since I can’t control what I’m feeling, I also can’t control the feelings of those I care about. What I can do is control my behavior. I can do something—anything. By doing, I can change my situation, which will almost always ultimately change my feelings.
We are only what we do. So doing is not just about taking control, it’s also a rejection of wishing, wanting, can’ting, or any other type of behavior that is non-constructive. I can dream about wanting to be successful all day — those dreams may be fun to imagine, but they do nothing to advance my state.
Here’s a memorable quote from the book that somewhat deals with the idea of dreaming and doing:
The first step in changing reality is to recognize it as it is now. There is no need to wish it were otherwise. It simply is. Pleasant or not, it is. Then comes behavior that acts on the present reality. Behavior can change what is. We may have visions of what will be. We cannot (and need not) prevent these dreams. But the visions won’t change the future. Action—in the present—changes the future. A trip of ten thousand miles starts out with one step, not with a fantasy about travel.
Indeed!
Constructive Living includes a number of exercises at the end of the book that work to refocus your life on doing. Not surprisingly, one of the exercises is exercising. Exercising is a fundamental way to act in a positive way and can work to change your feelings. Incidentally, he also suggests preparing your own meals. It’s interesting (to me) that over the past couple years, amidst a number of things I could not control, two things I’ve returned to over and over again have been cooking and exercise, which are really two core things that make you feel like a competent and capable human being.
CL has a distinct buddhist undertone. Another maxim in the book is that “self-centeredness is suffering,” which is less about being selfish and more about focusing your attention outward instead of dwelling on your own feelings. CL is actually based on Morita Therapy, a treatment that emerged out of Japan.
For such a short book, CL is worth re-reading. Even in its simplicity it has a great deal to digest, and I’m pretty sure I missed a few things.
Coincidentally, Penelope Trunk blogged on How to have more Self-Discipline the other day, and I’d recommend her post for a complimentary expression of Constructive Living (though I have no reason to believe that Penelope Trunk has read this book, there is a lot of great overlap in her post, which is also much better written than this scribbled out book review!).
