That’s what some pianists call the B section from Beethoven’s Für Elise, also known in my brain as the Hard Bit (there’s another Hard Bit at the end, but that’s just a load of fast arpeggios followed by a descending chromatic scale, not the mix of technical challenges here). A year ago, I wouldn’t have been able to even comprehend it, let alone play it. I had a vague idea that Every Good Boy Deserves Favours, but that was as far as my musical knowledge went. I didn’t know the difference between the bass and treble clefs, what grace notes or sixteenths were, or even how to play sharps and flats. I didn’t know what an arpeggio or a chromatic scale was. 

Now, I can read that and play it. 

This isn’t a You Can Do It post. 

A year ago, my dad got ill. The details aren’t really important for the next part, except to say that it got very bad, very fast, enough that I moved in with him to look after him full time. Those were difficult days: I was still working a bit (though my work was extremely understanding), trying to keep my fun-loving, sleep-hating two-year-old away from my wife for long enough to keep us all sane, and filling my days with doctor drop-bys and tube changes and family visits and trying to talk to my dad about all the stuff I wanted to before the end. I was very lucky: I had great colleagues, a supportive wife, and good friends. But it wasn’t any fun.

For all of my life, my dad was a musical dabbler. One of my strongest memories of being a kid is him playing the guitar while we sang Beatles songs and James Taylor tunes with my mum – just chords, because he never learned to read music. He liked to fiddle about and experiment, and he did not like take instruction. By the time I moved back in, he’d somehow acquired an old accordion (‘some of the buttons stick’), and a beautiful full-sized double bass that he’d learned a few notes on. He had a beginner violin with a few neat notes on his early research into how to play it in an exercise book tucked into the case (I found the book, and kept it, later). He had eight guitars, all strung left-handed (he made me promise to keep his favourite). He also had a keyboard. 

It was all right. A Yamaha E323 with Bossa Nova and Percussion settings and an LED screen that lit up to show what notes you were playing. It had 63 keys, which isn’t bad, and a ‘dynamic’ note setting even though they weren’t weighted (I later found out that this is important). It sounded, I thought, pretty good. 

I was 40. I couldn’t read music, or play another instrument (apart from a handful of horrible-sounding chords on the guitar, not enough to do a song with any sort of confidence). I decided to learn to play the piano. 

I’d sort of wanted to for a long time. There were a couple of piano tunes I really liked, and something about pressing buttons – the clarity of it, the binary yes/no of whether you’d done it right or wrong – appealed to me in a way that other instruments didn’t. I’d played guitar, but I never really wanted to be a Guitar Guy – the kind of person who plays in front of a crowd or starts plucking in a crowded park. You take your guitar to places deliberately, but pianos are more serendipitous – people only put them where they want you to play them. (If this was a You Can Do It post, this would be tip #1: find the instrument you genuinely want to be good at, not the one you think a person like you should be good at). I couldn’t concentrate on books. Watching films and TV shows felt stupid and pointless. And I really, really needed something.

I started in July, after I’d been at home for a few days. Scales first, then a couple of the tunes I wanted to play, picking them out with a combination of sheet music and YouTube tutorials showing the right fingering. I played at night, after my dad and son went to sleep, then watched videos and made notes on music theory when my brain and fingers refused to work on the playing any more. I wrote down the list of songs I most desperately wanted to be able to play: Maxence Cyrin’s cover of the Pixies’ Where Is My Mind, Ramin Djawadi’s beautiful arrangement of Radiohead’s No Surprises, Für Elise and (it says in the Goals bit of my notebook) ‘A Britney Spears medley.’ My wife, who played trumpet throughout her teens and twenties, took one look at what I was banging my head against, explained fairly gently that it was ridiculous, and bought me Albert’s Basic Piano Course, which turned out to be one of the books that every piano forum recommends. I used it every day. I kept flinging myself at the hard stuff, but only after I’d done the stuff I was supposed to be doing. I didn’t tell her. 

Piano is hard, and weird. At first, playing different rhythms with your two hands feels impossible, literally impossible, like everyone else you’ve seen doing it has some sort of special gift or trick that you are simply incapable of learning. So you slow it all the way down, pick it apart until it’s not even recognisable as music any more, do it every day, build it up again. Sometimes you take a day or a week off, and something you’ve been working on just ka-chunks into place so perfectly it’s genuinely hard to remember a time when you couldn’t do it. Then you find a different thing, maybe a harder thing, and do it again. 

My dad got weaker, but piano still helped: something to concentrate on at the end of long days, a thing that demanded all of my attention for 25 minutes at a time. Little things started to snap together: broken chords with a right-hand melody, the thumb-under rag roll and the Alberti bass. I half-learned dozens of easy songs, but Albert’s (very) easy version of the Entertainer was the first one I got obsessed with finishing: two pages of syncopation and tricky sightless leaps that I practiced dozens, then hundreds of times. I sort of managed to pick out the start of Fur Elise for my dad, but he was more impressed when I mashed through the first few chords of Let It Be. He asked me how long it might take me to learn the rest, and I cried – on my own, later – because I knew it wouldn’t be in time. 

My dad loved classical music. There might have been a literal tonne of it in his house: CD boxed sets and vinyl stuffing shelves and cupboards, boxes in the loft and trunks in the garage. It probably frustrated him that I never got into it: he liked to share things, was impossible to visit without acquiring at least one book or CD, and we talked about the other music we both liked when I visited. Piano gave me a new appreciation for it: picking apart Rondo Alla Turca and Sonata in C let me understand their structure, and I put Chopin’s Etudes and the third movement of the Moonlight Sonata on my ten-year-don’t-mention-it-to-anyone plan. Maybe I should have got into classical music years ago, but also maybe I wouldn’t have been able to. 

My dad died in October, four months after I knew anything was wrong, three months after I started piano. I took some time off, obviously, though playing still helped when I felt up to it. When things calmed down, I started again. If this was a You Can Do This post, there would be more tips here, things about how I structured my practice and kept motivated. The only thing I can think of now is: get something done on the days you don’t want to do anything, and embrace the days when there’s nothing else you’d rather do. Keep showing up, showing up and showing up, and try to occasionally look back and see how far you’ve come. 

I can play Fur Elise now, and the Hard Bit is the easiest bit (this is a tip I actually did get from a piano book: throw yourself at the end of every song first, so that you know that if you can get through the first part then everything else will be easy). I can play Where Is My Mind and No Surprises, at least well enough to make me happy late at night when nobody else is listening. I can’t play a Britney Spears medley yet, but give it time. 

This isn’t a You Can Do It post, but I will tell you that I’ll never regret the time I’ve spent learning piano this year. I think it might always remind me of my dad, which is why I couldn’t write a How I Learned Piano blogpost without talking about him. But that’s its own gift: when I play, I occasionally remember that I’m doing something he saw me start, and something he was happy that I decided to do. Maybe I will learn Chopin’s Etude Op. 10 No. 4 in ten years, or maybe I’ll get bored of it in another six months, but I will always have the appreciation of music and musicians it gave me. I will remember, I hope, when I look at a sheet of music, that once I couldn’t read it, let alone hope to make my fingers play it, and that the only thing that changed that was time, and effort. And I will remember, I think, that some things are just hard: but if you can get through the hardest bit, then the rest is a little bit easier.  

Here’s a video.

Homework: Do that thing you’ve been putting off. Start it today. 

For the past three years, I’ve been keeping a record of every book I read. It’s a simple idea with two main benefits: 

1. It encourages me to read more books (though maybe the wrong type of books, of which more in a second). 
2. It helps me to remember which books I’ve read, and encourages me to revisit the ideas in them.

But after two years of doing it, I realised that there was a third benefit I was missing. 

3. It helped me realise I wasn’t reading enough books by women. 

In 2017, only 16 out of 83 books I read were by women. In 2018, it was 9 out of 40, which is a better ratio but a worse actual number. And while we’re talking about ratios, here’s another one: a vastly disproportionate number of the books I really liked were by women. Sing, Unburied Sing and every book by Shirley Jackson were intimidatingly well written, Home Fire and The Power are worldview-wrenchers that I’d recommend to anyone, and Tiny Beautiful Things is completely full of the kind of advice that most people need to hear but absolutely won’t get from the latest Provocative Title! Explanatory Subtitle nonsense from some tech-bro who’s repurposed a bunch of /r/getdiscipline posts. Oh, and Mindy Kaling’s book is so funny I was laughing at chunks of it while I tried to walk my toddler to sleep in the park, which is completely counter-productive. 

So why don’t I read more books by women? There are lots of reasons I could probably cite, from recommendation algorithms letting me down to bookshops prioritising male authors to friends insisting that I read book after book by dudes (seriously, I’ve read one Jack Reacher, all right? Let it go), but if I’m honest it’s probably just good old unconscious bias, the same thing that lets political parties tell themselves that old white men must be the most competent to govern because that’s what they’re full of and tech-bros convince themselves that they were the best candidate for their jobs because they were the ones who got them. I spent two years thinking I must be reading enough books by women because I could name a bunch when prompted (availability bias), or that it wasn’t my fault if I didn’t read more because there just weren’t any books by women about things I wanted to read about (confirmation bias): but the maths is clear – I didn’t, and it was. 

So I decided to read more. And five months into 2019, I realised it wasn’t working. 

By that time, I’d already read Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez, an award-hooveringly well-researched tome on the gender data gap that causes everything from stab vests and seat belts to medical advice and tax structures to be designed with an eye on men. One innovation that Perez discusses is the UK Labour party’s adoption of All-Women Shortlists to select potential MPs, a measure that helped them field a 41% female set of candidates for parliament in 2017 (the Tories and Lib Dems, who didn’t use AWS, managed 29% each). Basically, they work: and they might be one of the best ways to address the inherent inequalities of a system that’s been front-loaded in men’s favour ever since it was set up. And so I, who had read 20 books by men and somehow – even though it felt like loads more – only 4 by women almost halfway through the year – decided to read books by women until I at least hit a 50:50 ratio. 

Then I had a shitty three months and barely read a book (I’m not writing about this here). And so I hit September needing to get through a book a week. No male authors allowed.

Reader, it was a good four months. 

First things first, though. Early in the year I absolutely inhaled Tara Westover’s Educated, a memoir full of honesty and insight, imposter syndrome and advice you’ll hopefully never need (“When you chop a chicken’s head off, you shouldn’t smile because you might get blood and feathers in your mouth.”) that I’d recommend to absolutely anyone. 

I also bashed through Hanna Jameson’s The Last and Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister The Serial Killer, both perfectly formed little thrillers that couldn’t be more different from each other. And while we’re talking about speed-reading, I time-warped my way through Sandra Newman’s The Heavens in about six straight hours during a stay in hospital: it’s a perfectly-formed love story full of beautiful bits of phrasing that I’m certainly not going to spoil here.

Back on the non-fiction, Stasiland is a trip behind the Cold War curtain that feels as if it could have only been written by a female author – the sort of confidences Anna Funder teased out of her interviewees might have been impossible for anyone else to unearth, and her own perspective’s undeniably shaped by the sort of unease around men that, unfortunately, only women have to feel. Emma Smith’s This Is Shakespeare was also fantastic, with (among loads of other clever facts you’ll want to toss in next time you watch Baz Luhrman’s Romeo + Juliet) some interesting observations on how gender worked in an era where every actor was male. 

Amanda Palmer’s The Art Of Asking felt exactly like a feature-length, director’s-commentary-on version of her TED talk – whether you think that’s a good or bad thing is really on you – but the the central insight, that you shouldn’t be afraid to ask for stuff, is solid, and marred only by a Twitter meltdown earlier this year that made it feel like the sequel should be called The Art of Demanding.  Meanwhile, the only really bad book I bothered to finish this year was Emma Gannon’s The Multi-Hyphen Method, which felt an awful lot like a blogpost stretched into a bubblegum-thin couple of hundred pages – with endless Ctrl+Ved studies to pad it out – and didn’t even have much actionable advice to back it up. 

Back on the fiction, The Natural Way of Things was a horrid but weirdly uplifting read, and had the distinction of being the best dystopian novel set in Australia I read this year until the last two thirds of Terra Nullius came along to blast it straight out of the billabong. The Need, meanwhile, managed to be a frantic page-turner that stayed with me for months AND include some of the best descriptions of trying to look after small children since Sing Unburied Sing, combining the desperate scramble of keeping under-tens happy, fed, and safe with…well, all the other stuff the book is about (side note: between Helen Philips’ description of children as a digestive tract to look after and The Power’s observation that, at some point, you’re responsible for the upkeep of every crevice of your child, you’ve got the perfect description of keeping a tiny human). I didn’t much care about Jamrach’s Menagerie except for the fact that it was partly based on the true story of a tiger amok in East London. 

It’s been an awful year for lots of reasons, and Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies didn’t make me any happier about it, though it did do an excellent job of teasing apart at least some of the mess we’re in (including a bit on the woke left’s constant determination to tear itself to shreds, which felt especially relevant in the second half of the year). Similarly, Isabel Hardman’s Why We Get The Wrong Politicians was almost too depressing to read after a year when a bunch of incompetents, racists and profiteers spectacularly failed to deliver anything except empty promises and a powerful sense of dread. Oh, and I don’t know whether I can count The Secret Barrister’s terrifying dissection of the recent dismantling of the UK legal system as a female-authored book (because her identity’s a secret, duh), but you should read it anyway. 

Anyway. All the best stuff I read this year was biographical, and so Furious Hours very nearly scooped the top honours, smartly weaving together three disparate stories (a murder, the subsequent trial, and a biography of Harper Lee) into one insanely readable narrative. Close behind was Sue Prideaux’s I Am Dynamite, a surprisingly touching take on the life of Friedrich Nietzche that introduced me to the fascinating Cosima Wagner, whose expertise in shade-throwing makes me want to read an entire book about her (one favourite: when Nietzche announced his intention to join the Prussian military, her response was to suggest that sending them a box of cigars might be more useful). But the actual best book of the year was Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five, a determinedly well-researched and fantastically well written reexamination of the five women murdered by Jack the Ripper. A fascinating, quite often horrifying snapshot of a London that stacked everything against women and the poor (and so poor women most of all), it ends on a ferocious conclusion reminding the reader that some of the worst Victorian attitudes still fester today. Read it soon. 

I saw out the year with The Water Cure which one of my friends (correctly) described as ‘more of a mood than a novel’ and I Am Lucy Barton, a nice reminder (harking back to Educated) that relationships are usually more complicated than ‘This person is good/bad’. Oh, and I also read a bunch of books by men, full list below. What did I learn? Well, apart from a bunch of stuff about Othello, 8Chan and 19th century Sweden’s horrifying misogyny, this year’s reading reminded me that sometimes deliberately restricting your choices is actually the only way to expand them. Oh, and that I should probably keep the 50:50 ratio going, which should be a lot easier since the stuff I’ve already read has me hankering for more. If you, dear reader, have any book suggestions, please leave them in the comments. And Live Hard!

The Full List

This Is Shakespeare – Emma Smith

Tyrant: Shakespeare on Power – Stephen Greenblatt

The Story of Art – E.H. Gombrich

The Marshmallow Test – Walter Mischel

Chernobyl – Serhii Plokhy

Leonardo DaVinci – Walter Isaacson

The Science Of Storytelling – Will Storr

Invisible Women – Caroline Criado Perez

Educated – Tara Westover

10 The Last – Hanna Jameson

My Sister The Serial Killer – Oyinkan Braithwaite

The Multi-Hyphen Method – Emma Gannon

Chickenhawk – Robert Mason

Bad Blood – John Carreyou

The Shadow of the Sun – Ryszard Kapuscinki

Anna Funder – Stasiland

The People Of The Abyss – Jack London

Killing Floor – Lee Child

Blitzed – Norman Ohler

The Crack-Up – Budd Schulberg

My War Gone By, I Miss It So – Anthony Lloyd

Jamrach’s Menagerie – Carol Birch

Every Tool’s A Hammer – Adam Savage 

Playing To The Gallery – Grayson Perry

Ways Of Seeing – John Berger

What Are You Looking At? – Will Gomperz

Michaelangelo & The Pope’s Ceiling – Ross King

Left Of Bang – Jason A. Riley

The Natural Way Of Things – Charlotte Wood

The Secret Barrister

The Need – Helen Phillips

Furious Hours- Casey Cep

The Art of Asking – Amanda Palmer

Kill All Normies – Angela Nagle

The Heavens – Sandra Newman

Furious Hours – Casey Cep

Terra Nullius – Claire G. Coleman

I Am Lucy Barton – Elizabeth Strout

Why We Get The Wrong Politicians – Isabel Hardman

The Water Cure – Sophie Mackintosh

The Five – Hallie Rubenhold

I Am Dynamite – Sue Prideaux

Homework: Read a book by a woman. Then read another one.

1. It was too dark and too many people survived, but basically great!
2. It ruined the whole series OMG.

Listen, I’m not here to tell you that if you think thing 2 you are wrong, exactly. I’m just here to tell you that if you think thing 2 you are probably ruining your own life.

Let’s break this down.

Most people who are upset about how the (spoilers!) Night King died feel that way because they think Jon should have killed him. Jon, after all, is odds-on favourite to be Azor Ahai, the Prince Who Was Promised, the flaming-sword-swinging saviour set to defend humanity in its darkest hour. Arya, meanwhile, is…I dunno, a girl? And Jon would have fought him mano-a-mano, while Arya just, well, got the fucking job done.

Here’s the thing, though: prophecies aren’t real. Sort-of-not in Thrones land, but definitely not in real life. And Jon, while excellent at swordfighting, hasn’t spent seven years or whatever training under swordmasters and faceless men, learning to walk silently with the waif and fight dirty with the Hound. Back in season 2, she already knows that anyone can be killed – she’s been preparing half her life for this moment, and she has tossed away her own fear of death to be ready for it. Jon is great at making friends and fighting dudes with a sword, and both of those are great, valuable traits, that he has practised and perfected, but sometimes those things are not enough. If Jon really knew what was up, the episode would have ended with the Night King standing imperiously amid a ring of boiling fire and then getting merced in the head from the side with a dragonglass-tipped arrow, because honestly who the hell goes into to the Long Night with only one White Walker-killing weapon if they have a choice? But it didn’t, because that’s not Jon’s thing. And so.

And so here’s the takeway: you get what you practice for, assuming you also get quite lucky as well. You don’t get what you’re destined for, or what you should get – you get good at what you do over and over again, until your knuckles bleed and you can’t sleep properly and everything feels like just too much but you keep doing it anyway. Arya knows this: Jon knows this. If you deny this, you’re setting yourself up for failure. As Tormund would probably say: fuck prophecy. And live hard.

You can thank Marie Kondo or capitalism, but now we’re too smart to collect things and not experiences, at least if we’ve watched enough Hoarders. We’ve ruthlessly pruned everything out of our lives and wardrobes that doesn’t bring us joy, and we’re ready to march forward into the Age Of Aquarius with nothing but our laptops, equipped with Spotify and Netflix but maybe packing an external hard drive pre-loaded with HBO shows just in case. Nobody needs a DVD collection any more, but holy shit man you haven’t heard the latest Tim Ferriss podcast? Keep up broseph, your brain-vault’s looking kind of empty. Maybe you should subscribe to Amazon Prime and a bunch of true-crime podcasts, just to make it look lived-in.

I can’t call this Intellectual or Cultural Materialism because those terms are already wedded to concepts I barely understand, but please believe this: Streaming Service Materialism exists, and it is driving you insane. As always, things come back to evolution, in the strictest sense of replicating entities competing for space in a resource-scarce environment: capitalism, the media, even the decadent West might not want you to do anything, but a bunch of companies and their executives have needs and third-quarter targets, and those inconveniently align with jamming your brain-space so full that you can’t fucking move. Also: technically this works better than traditional materialism, because at the end of the day these companies aren’t giving away any materials, they’re just spending millions and millions of dollars fine-tuning their algorithms to make sure the Watch Next button never goes unclicked. Also also: almost nobody, anywhere in the 7 Things You Should Have Seen By Now ecosphere, has any incentive to tell you to stop. You can write one article about Why Everyone Should Watch Less TV, but you can’t write one a week, that’s why this blog never updates. You can play Have-You-Seen…? Tennis with half of your office until the HR department sends around a sharply-worded email, but if you say something about preferring to spend time outside or alone, you’re instantly the asshole.

Well, here’s one asshole, telling you: stop. There is no such thing as must-see TV. You should not endeavour to fill every minute of your day, every mental crevice, with triple-A titles or award-winning documentaries or even TED talks and podcasts, just because you can. Stop, stop, stop.

Here’s how to start.

Start with the time you’re willing to invest, not the shows you have to watch

This is just the same as walking into a casino with all the money you’re prepared to bet in one pocket: it makes sure things don’t spiral out of control. I watch one hour of TV a night – at most – and a couple of films at weekends. If something doesn’t fit into that schedule – it doesn’t get watched. If something comes along that I really, really want to watch, it knocks something else out, or it gets watched later. Starting with all the things your friends/colleagues/favourite websites/streaming service recommend and then trying to fit them all in is straight-up insanity. Start with the time, then work out how to fit the viewing in.

Don’t watch shows until they’re done

This takes patience and a willingness to be ostracised in office conversation, but it’s all you really need. I can’t explain it any better than The Wire’s David Simon: “I tend not to watch shows until they finish and then somebody will come to me and say, ‘No, no, they knew what they were doing, they knew where they were going’, and so I’ll be sticking in DVDs or downloads two years after something’s on the air. Nothing’s worse than giving eight hours, to find out, boy, that was a great idea but those guys really didn’t have a plan… so I end up taking the guesswork out of it by being late to everything.’ Something gets spoilered? Congratulations, now you don’t have to watch it: if a show’s only worth seeing for the mid-season mega-twist, maybe it wasn’t worth watching in the first place.

Refuse to watch things that aren’t good from the beginning

‘But it really kicks in around episode five.’ Oh, so I should drop the time commitment of a medium-sized book into something because I might like it later? Hard pass. Glengarry Glen Ross manages to establish the stakes, make you care about the characters, and learn everyone’s name in the first twenty minutes, and that’s a film about seven dudes in an office talking. Fuck your slow burn.

Stop watching things when they go bad

This is basic sunk cost theory: just because you’ve already invested forty hours of life into a show doesn’t mean you have to keep watching as it congeals. ‘But I want to know how it ends.’ Just make something up, it’s a work of fiction and you have an imagination, you used to be able to do this when you were a kid. Maybe Carl grows up to marry Negan and they go on to find a cure for the zombie virus together? The main thing is, it’s all going to be fine.

If you don’t have time to think, keep chopping until you do

Here’s a parallel with lifting that I don’t think is completely crazy: you don’t get stronger in the gym, you get stronger by recovering from what you do in the gym. However many podcasts you listen to, thought provoking documentaries you watch, or self-help books you read, none of them are going to help if you don’t give the ideas time to bed in, space to swirl around your brain and connect the dots with the stuff that’s already there. How much time is enough for this? I don’t know, but even twenty minutes a day where I’m not wired in seems to give my brain the breathing space to come up with my own ideas: time where I’m not hanging out with anyone else or ingesting any form of culture, but just walking around, staring out of a window or sitting somewhere outdoors with a coffee. If this isn’t something you have in your day, I’d suggest chopping other stuff out – yeah, including music – to get it done. And if you do it and don’t find yourself coming up with new ideas, feeling more mentally refreshed, bursting to get stuff done – you probably aren’t doing it enough.

The world is amazing, now. You can watch or listen to anything you want, for almost no money, instantly.

But you don’t have to.

HOMEWORK: Decide on how many nightly TV hours you’re willing to invest this week: it can be one or six, as long as you pick a number. Aim to spend at least ten minutes a day with no mental stimulation of any kind: no podcast while you walk, no music, no nothing. Stick to it.

‘What’s your ratio of good jiujitsu sessions vs bad jiujitsu sessions? Mine is running 1:3 at [the] moment.’

And instead of going with the smart-arse immediate answer (‘Define “Good”), I actually thought about it. I think my ratio’s more like 1:3:1 – one session where everything’s great, one where I’m terrible, and about three in five punch-the-clock days where I just go in, bump fists and get it done. An interesting thing: from experience, this seems pretty typical across a lot of spheres. Writing, drawing, going to the gym: maybe 20 percent of sessions suck, 20 percent are great, and the other 60 are just fine. Is this helpful? It depends how happy you are with only being happy 20 percent of the time.

The thing is, to get really good at anything, you have to put a lot of time into it, and a good way to do that is to find ways to have good days every day. So even on the days where you come away with a bruised jaw, mat burns on your forehead and the painful memory of tapping out to a Hail-Mary baseball bat choke (please find your own metaphor), the session still did something. How do you do that?

You make it about the process.

In jiu-jitsu, this means learning something new every day. Preferably something that fits into the stuff you’re already learning: it’s fine to learn a new move, but better if you can eliminate a mistake you regularly make, or shore up a weak spot where you aren’t really sure what to do. If a dude taps you out six times and then shows you what to do so that he won’t tap you out so easily again, that wasn’t a bad session: that was a great session. If what you get is less than that, a small thing that you won’t always be able to use but that advances your knowledge 1%, that’s still a good day. Sometimes, I still forget this and make it all about the rolling. These are the bad days.

In the gym, things are similar: some days you feel strong and crush everything, some everything goes wrong and you can’t get your 3RM up for a shitty single. These are the days when you really get it done: you focus on your technique, pull your scaps back and down, get your heel placement right and lock everything in for the next time you’re feeling strong, when you’ll feel the benefit of those reps.

In drawing: well, I’m terrible at drawing. But I have days where I pull out something good, and ones where what I do is so embarrassing I want to screw it up and throw it away (I mostly don’t, because looking at my old failures is a) Instructive and b) Heartening, a few weeks down the line). But the good sessions are the ones where I find something to fix: I realise that I can’t foreshorten a head from underneath or draw a fucking eye properly, and I dig into the nitty-gritty of sorting that out.

In life, there are good and bad days. But if you’re learning on all of them, then none of them are that bad.

HOMEWORK: Pick a skill that you’ve been meaning to fix: the one that’s the hardest, and the one that’s holding you back. If you don’t know what that is, ask somebody better than you. Go fix it.

So I decided to read lots. The vague goal was a couple of books a week, which I more-or-less stuck to – I thought about going for an even hundred, but quickly realised I’d end up deliberately reading short, sharp books and skipping the weightier stuff, which ran counter to the whole spirit of the thing. So instead of going for a target number, I just stuck with the principles from this post – which, summarised, are:

• Read everywhere
• Read all the time
• Make reading into a habit

Here’s what I learned, followed by mini-reviews of the full list, followed by my top ten of the year. Yes, this is a long post.

Reading broadly makes reading fast easier

It’s much easier to read lots if you have two books in the clip at once. Sometimes, you’re in no mood for hard science and you need fiction: sometimes, when you’re worn out on fanciful phrasing, you can just speed through some self-help tome that’s spinning out a TED talk into 250 pages. The surprising bonus: this way, you see connections between books and ideas everywhere, in the most unlikely places, until it feels like your brain’s fizzing.

You have to read fiction

I’ve talked to a couple of high-achieving people this year (one ex-special forces, one Olympian), who told me that they don’t read fiction because it’s a waste of time. I respectfully disagree: studies suggest that fiction increases your empathy, and I’d anecdotally argue that literature gives a better handle on the tragedies of human history (and the human psychology behind them) than more dry historical accounts. Also: the sheer buzz of reading pure, well-written fiction beats a whole lot of other legal (and illegal) highs, at least for me.

Science is better when it’s written by scientists

I went to the source for a lot of my science-reading this year, and it makes a huge difference. Most importantly, good scientists are in it for the furthering of human knowledge, which means they’ll admit when there are shortcomings in an argument or aren’t sure something is right: unlike professional writers, who are pretty invested in cherry-picking arguments that support the book they’re selling. Counter-intuitively, this makes them more trustworthy: if one guy goes ‘Evidence is scant for this one thing but we’re pretty sure this other thing is true’, it’s a lot easier to use the information than when a book presents everything as equally valid, equally stone-cold true. Secondly, you get better anecdotes from scientists who’ve amassed them over long careers than the what-I-did-on-my-holidays nonsense you get from journalists (classic example: the Gladwellian trend of telling you about every interview subject’s hair and outfit, in detail). Thirdly, scientists understand science, which is important when you’re talking about science.

I need to read more books by women

There was a point, sometime around October, when I decided to tot up how many books by women I’d read over the year, reasoning that, since I could remember a lot, it was probably at least 40% of the total. This turned out to be availability bias, and stupendously wrong: it was less than 25%, even though those books a) Were some of the very best of the year and b) Gave me a much-needed perspective on a lot of things I hadn’t been thinking about. Yes, I also need to read more by authors from minorities: I couldn’t even kid myself about that one.

The full rundown? Okay, let’s do this. If you’d rather just get the top 10, skip to the bottom.

I read Stephen King’s On Writing near the start of the year, which is both fascinating biography and a kick in the pants for anyone who thinks books should take years to write. Then Into The Woods gave me the superpower of being able to predict the plot of (almost) any book or TV show I ever watch, and also the excellent showoff phrase ‘fractal plot-arcs’. Cheryl Strayed’s Tiny Beautiful Things was a fantastic collection of good advice from a lady I grew to respect more after I also read her memoir Wild, which (alongside Robert Webb’s similarly excellent How Not To Be A Boy) was probably the closest I came to crying at a book all year. After that I recovered with Alan Partridge’s stupid-but-funny Nomad, then John Vaillant’s impeccably researched and beautifully written exploration of environmentalism, survivalists and Russian masculinity The Tiger, which was so good that I immediately bought his logging/ environmentalism/ colonialism primer The Golden Spruce and enjoyed that even more. Oh, and Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning was every bit as good as you’ve heard. It’s also short! Read it today.

Also early in the year I bashed through Matt Fitzgerald’s pretty good (though not as good as Iron War) How Bad Do You Want It? And then David Halberstam’s The Education Of A Coach, which wasn’t as good as The Score Takes Care Of Itself, though I’d still much rather read about American football than actually watch it. Ed Caesar’s Two Hours was solid – especially in the context of the recent Nike attempt at a sub-2 marathon – but a bit heavy on the anecdotes and light on the science for my liking, which might not be the same as yours.

Unexpectedly, Zia Hayder Rahm’s In Light Of What We Know was a minor clanger – it feels a lot like a collection of nice ideas smashed together with a story that doesn’t quite work – but then I stumbled onto Sebastian Junger’s Tribe and loved the writing so much that I grabbed and devoured War, The Perfect Storm and (later in the year) A Death In Belmont, bringing me entirely up to date with an author I didn’t even know I was missing out on. Junger reminds me a bit of The Corner’s David Simon in his approach to journalism: he plants himself in a corner and starts chatting to people, spends months getting the research right, then tells you a story that explains everything from first principles until you feel like an expert. Just incredible stuff.

I also read enough end-of-the-world books to form their own category, starting with the science-heavy The Knowledge, which made me resolve to learn more science but also left me utterly convinced that the main problem with every single survival scenario is not immediately starving to death. Margaret Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last was the only mild dud, starting out brilliantly with a little-used scenario (economic meltdown), then trailing off into satire with a bunch of set-pieces that felt like they’d been cobbled together from other projects. Seveneves (moon explosion) was classic Neal Stephenson, in that it was a bunch of variably-interesting discourses on engineering, space travel and mad future biology, smashed together into a story that I read really, really fast considering it was 900 pages long. Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven (pandemic) just loses out to Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars (pandemic) for honourable mentions, but the head-and-shoulders winner was Black Wave (environmental catastrophe), which really only uses the scenario as the backdrop to a glorious riot of lesbian culture, memorable similes and smart observations (‘people tended to judge drug abuse unless you were an imposing or hardy man and then they sort of reluctantly envied your daring.’’Michelle seemed more like some sort of compulsively rutting land mammal, a chimera of dog in heat and black widow, a sex fiend that kills its mate.’) In actual how-fucked-is-the-world terms Eric Hoffer’s must-read True Believer  was my most-highlighted book of the year, with 78 passages) barely shows its age (typical quote: ‘We do not make people humble and meek when we show them their guilt and cause them to be ashamed of themselves. We are more likely to stir their arrogance and rouse in them a reckless aggressiveness.’) Meanwhile, Will Storr’s Selfie is a fantastic sequel to his also-excellent Heretics: an investigation of the roots of our never-more-narcissistic age that starts at Ancient Greece and ends with Instagram. Oh, and Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism is a zippy little number that’ll give you smart things to say about Zizek and a handful of classic films , in case that seems worth a go.

Somewhere in May I suddenly had a newborn baby to deal with, and so I read a whole bunch of American classics in a sleep-deprived fug at 4am, cradling the little chap in my arms. The Things They Carried was haunting and great, Flowers For Algernon more uplifting than advertised and Fahrenheit 451 actually a bit patchy, but with spots of ferociously good writing/insight that make it certainly worth a go. Somewhere in there, medical memoir When Breath Becomes Air left me sort of numb, Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived In The Castle shone with black humour and Syd Moore’s witch-detective-romance Strange Magic was absolutely fine, though also totally missable.

On the borders between science and self-help, Daniel Levitin’s The Organised Mind is a fantastic introduction to the genre, covering actionable tips from almost every field in a tome so comprehensive it’s actually kind of exhausting. Angela Duckworth’s Grit and Gabriele Oetingen’s Rethinking Positive Thinking were both excellent distillations of research conducted by the authors themselves, and so both worth a read, even if the central messages of both (do hard things on purpose/visualise challenges when you set goals) probably don’t demand a book-length read. Peak, written by the man who conceptualised what we now call ‘deliberate practice’ (Anders Ericsson), clarifies a tonne of the misinformation around his theories – including the reason the 10,000 hour ‘rule’ isn’t really a thing, which means that I now automatically mistrust any book that cites it. Unfortunately, that includes Ben Bergeron’s Chasing Excellence, which was an otherwise-okay roundup of mental prep techniques used by pro CrossFit athletes, padded out with a load of descriptions of the games that you’d be better off watching on YouTube – if you’re in the market for sports psychology Steve Magness’s Peak Performance is a solid intro to a whole bunch of good ideas, and generally just better. Meanwhile, Adam Grant’s Originals seemed compelling at the time but I haven’t used anything from it, Ryan Holiday’s The Obstacle Is The Way was a decent mish-mash of anecdotes, Peter Thiel’s Zero To One is too full of survivor-bias bullshit to read with a straight face (one of my Kindle notes just reads ‘wanker’) and Charles Duhigg’s Smarter, Faster, Better was straight-up excellent, though not as life-changing as The Power Of Habit. Best of all, partly because the author used his own advice to become a world champion in his subject matter, was Moonwalking With Einstein, a zippy read through the history of memory with actual insights into how to use the info inside.

Dancing effortlessly into ‘harder’ science, Niels Birbaumer’s Your Brain Knows More Than You Think was a zippy little intro to neuroplasticity which dovetailed nicely with Marc Lewis’s The Biology Of Desire, a fascinating take on why we’re (probably) getting our treatment of addiction all wrong…and led perfectly into Steven Kotler’s Stealing Fire, which has some fascinating stuff to say about the intersection between psychedelics, ‘peak experiences’ and spirituality. Mark O’Connell’s To Be a Machine managed to dawdle its way around a bunch of absolutely fascinating subjects (AI, cryotherapy, life extension) without actually explaining any of them properly, and annoyed so much with its English-professor whimsy that I jumped straight into Nick Bostrom’s bracingly stern Superintelligence, which made me alternately terrified and weirdly buoyant about the possibility of ‘strong’ AI. Semi-relatedly, I also read Ashlee Vance’s biography of Elon Musk, which has just enough insight on the man’s thinking that it’s probably worth a quick blast, though you’re probably going to end up liking Musk less when you’re done. Cordelia Fine’s Delusions Of Gender was an enlightening read full of teflon-coated argument ammo, and The Undercover Economist had some interesting points but assumed I agreed with its central arguments a bit too much for my fucking liking, ta. Oh, and the only book on the list that I read for the second time was Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, which I put down the first time absolutely convinced that he’d got a load of basic facts wrong. It turned out that he hadn’t, I was overexaggerating in my mind, and it was actually a fun read even on the second go. Sorry, Yuval.

I’m always interested in what high-performers in disparate fields do, and Tommy Caldwell’s Push was a brilliant insight into the effort – and setbacks – that go into being, genuinely, the best in the world at a thing (in this case, free-climbing El Capitan’s Dawn Wall). Dan Hardy’s Part Reptile is a smart reminder that the best people are often good at applying themselves to other things (commentary and fight analysis, say, but also some of the DMT/ayahuasca riffs that came earlier in Stealing Fire), and Michael Gibney’s Sous Chef a super-readable take on the expertise and thought that goes into a very different field. Jack Slack’s Notorious was less exciting because it’s pretty much a straight bio of Conor McGregor with some fight tips, but Candice Millard’s River Of Doubt, taking on a little-known period of Teddy Roosevelt’s ridiculous life, was a straight-up swashbuckler full of meticulous research and spit-take tales of derring-do. Very recommended.

There were three fiction books that I read in less than 24 hours each this year, and Naomi Alderman’s The Power was the best: a wrenching perspective-shift that starts with a smart premise (what if women were the overpowered gender, instead of men?) then delivers on it near-flawlessly. Second place was Home Fire, a book which you should endeavour to read entirely spoiler-free so I’ll shut up now, and third was Nic Pizzolatto’s Galveston, which is exactly the blend of booze-ruined characters and hardscrabble storytelling you’d expect from the man behind True Detective. Other books I blazed through just as fast as I fucking could included Budd Schulberg’s The Harder They Fall, a wisecracking tumble through the dirtiest era of boxing and The Contortionist’s Handbook, a breathless belter that felt more Chuck Palahniuk than most of Palahniuk’s own recent stuff. Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad was an absolutely searing read – awful, brutal stuff on an era I know shamefully little about – and Graeme Macrae Burnet’s His Bloody Project was a decent enough couple of hundred pages on serf-era Scotland…followed by another couple of hundred that probably seemed cool to people who haven’t heard of Rashomon. Maybe I just didn’t get it.

[Takes deep breath]

Somewhere in the summer a friend of mine recommended Gavin DeBecker’s The Gift Of Fear and Rory Miller’s Conflict Communication, both of which are full of game-changingly good insights: DeBecker on avoiding everything from assault to stalking and Miller on having more productive conversations with bosses, relatives and violent criminals – though not necessarily in that order. I liked the second one so much I ended up in a rabbit-hole of Miller books – Meditations On Violence and Training For Sudden Violence are both worth your money/time – and then graduated to his recommended reading, knocking off serial-killer memoir Whoever Fights Monsters (fine), criminal mindset primer Beggars And Thieves (okay) and seminal ‘violentisation’ investigation Why They Kill (banger) in short order. While we’re talking criminality I also read A Burglar’s Guide To The City, which was more like a collection of essays than a book and therefore only intermittently interesting: and then I started a new website, which you should definitely look at if you haven’t already.

By then it was October, and since my first Halloween read (Sarah Lots’ Day Four, which was completely fine until an ending that somehow retroactively made the rest of the book worse) was a dud, I went back to Shirley Jackson with The Haunting Of Hill House, a deservedly stone-cold classic featuring the best description of an evil building you’ll ever read. JD Vance’s controversial Hillbilly Elegy introduced me to a subset of America I didn’t know much about, Ta Nehisi Coates’ lyrical, brilliant Between The World And Me reminded me that there’s a whole world of bullshit that never even touches me (I also read his run on Black Panther, but that’s a graphic novel so I’m not counting it) and then the perfect jab-hook combo of Chimamanda Ngozi Achie’s We Should All Be Feminists and Katie Anthony’s Feminist Werewolf reminded me a couple more times. Benjamin Lorr’s Hell-Bent made a late-but-unsuccessful bid for the top ten: a non-stop spin through the mad world of Bikram yoga that wears its David Foster Wallace influence like a fancy hat. With the nights coming in I saw off Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology at a brisk clip, and read The Little Prince to the baby (he didn’t get it). I saved Robert Sapolsky’s magisterial Behave for the end of the year, because though it’s 800 pages long (including several appendices on intricate bits of biology that he insists you read), it’s every bit as brilliant as all of his other books, just as good as I hoped it would be, mixing science, anecdote and whimsy with a self-deprecating style and clear love of the subject that’s just a joy to read. Also: he thanks his research assistants in the footnotes, which seems like the behaviour of a very nice man.

Phew.

The top ten? Okay, these are the ones that I suggest you read: not necessarily the ones that I enjoyed the most (you’ll have to pick those out of the mega-post), but the ones that I think are the most life-changing for readers of Live Hard. In order, then:

10. Conflict Communication

This was the book that made me realise I used to spend a lot of time talking to my team and my bosses wrong, even when I thought I was pretty good at it. You’re probably doing it too.

9. Home Fire

A kick in the brain of fiction-as-empathy, which all of the publicity material does its best to spoiler for you. Just buy it and read it with no more ado.

8. Selfie

Will Storr’s intellectual curiosity comes blasting through every page of this, and it’s just endlessly fascinating. Will read again.

7. Tiny Beautiful Things

A book of advice columns? Listen, buddy: you’re not too good for advice columns. Get this one, and improve your life.

6. Moonwalking With Einstein

Want a superpower? Reading this book feels like it gives you a superpower. (Into The Woods does too, but you don’t want the superpower of spoiling-all-films-for-yourself, trust me).

5. Tribe

Honestly, this should say ‘Everything by Sebastian Junger’, but this one’s the most universal (and the shortest). Read it immediately.

4. The Gift Of Fear

I’ve recommended this book to every lady I care about, and you ought to read it too. Turns out I would’ve been terrible at dealing with a stalker. 

3. The Power

A book that takes its elevator pitch and sprints with it, zig-zagging occasionally to stiff-arm your tidy ideas about gender straight in the face. Glorious and terrifying.

2. Black Wave

I’m still not even sure what happens in this book, but sometimes I still chuckle about how much fun it was to read.

1. Behave

Robert Sapolsky on top form, in a consideration of our best and worst behaviours that’s occasionally challenging but always entertaining. I love Robert Sapolsky. 

Next year: I’m going to do one book-update post a month, because honestly doing it all at once is insane. Read hard!

HOMEWORK: Read one of the top ten this week.

So what is the definition of real-life superheroics? You could argue forever about this, but rather than do that I’m going to break it down to two things, and you can argue with me in the comments if you like. I think it comes down to:

1. Changing the world for the better. 
2. Being brave about it. 

And, as luck would have it, I’ve had the good fortune to talk to two people this year who fit the definition. They’re extremely different in aims and approach – but I think that, if you look at what they’ve done, you can see commonalities in the way they operate that are a) Helpful and b) Maybe the only way to actually get anything serious done. I’ll explain those at the end. First: the case studies.

Case study 1: The Real-Life Iron-Man

You might have seen Richard Browning in Wired, or giving TED talks, or hovering above the ground in any number of YouTube videos: he’s the guy attempting to revolutionise human flight by strapping miniature gas turbines to his limbs, like a real-life version of the Iron Man suit (early test runs look uncannily similar to Tony Stark’s prototypes from the films).

This isn’t just some tinpot project: with the tech he currently has available, Richard could fly thousands of feet in the air at hundreds of miles an hour – he just hasn’t done it yet, because he’s working on a way to make failures survivable. He’s now heading up a company of specialists in all the different areas that will drive the tech forward, polyurethane fuel tank expertise, radio frequency and welding expertise, from CAD design expertise to software engineering and aerodynamics experts, with patents on technology that has huge implications for aeronautics.

(Side note: if you’re reading this and going ‘Yeah, but is it actually good for the world?’ then please allow me to explain that Richard is also using the same mindset to develop tech designed to provide ultra-efficient solar energy to African schools by upcycling old car batteries – it just isn’t as immediately attention-grabbing as flying around in a rocket suit).

Anyway, I wanted to talk to Richard because, while everyone else was getting excited about the tech behind the rockets (how many PSi of thrust?!), nobody was actually asking him any interesting questions about his thought process or background in calisthenics, and the chat we had was fascinating – you can read most of it here. Key takeaways? Richard combined several years’ worth of training in calisthenics with a longtime interested in aeronautics to get to a point where strapping rockets to himself seemed like an obvious step, and now he can fly through the fucking sky. That, I hope you’ll agree, is awesome.

Case Study 2: The Game-Changing Campaigner

Earlier this year, Caroline Criado-Perez had two big wins within the same week, though they were years in the offing: first, the successful campaign to get a woman’s face (Jane Austen’s, in the end, though she’d have been happy with others) on British banknotes, and secondly the effort to get a statue of suffragist leader Millicent Fawcett in London’s parliament square, alongside the eleven other all-male political figures already there.

If you can’t see why this is important then Caroline has already explained it better than I can, but the TL;DR is that girls (and full-grown women) benefit from prominent role models: by being underrepresented in news, the media and culture generally, they grow up underestimating their own abilities, developing self-limiting beliefs that are both conscious and subconscious. If Caroline’s campaigning reminds thousands (millions?) of little girls that they’re just as competent and capable of political, scientific or cultural greatness as men, she will have made the world a better place.

Oh, and it isn’t irrelevant to point out that Caroline has put up with an awful lot of shit to do this: the Austen campaign, in particular, led to a sustained campaign of horrendous online abuse against her that included two people being jailed for making death threats. Women, generally, have to deal with exponentially more of this than men, and as a dude who’s only ever had to deal with a bit of mild online trolling (and hated it), I can only be impressed with how she coped. If you don’t think it’s especially brave, consider this: would you rather fly around with rockets on your feet, or have hundreds of faceless online avatars calling you awful names? I know which I’d pick.

Anyway. Hopefully you’re on board with this by now. Two potentially world-changing people, two very different approaches. What the hell do they have in common? I’ll tell you.

1. You start from where you are.
2. You do the first thing first.

Changing the world sounds like a nice goal, but it’s too big. How are you supposed to even get your head around it? Both Caroline and Richard worked with what they had, and started from where they were: Richard as a dude with stronger-than-average arms and a background in science, Caroline as a very smart woman with a decent set of contacts.

Richard wondered why it wasn’t possible to pursue human flight in a different way from the usual jetpacks and hang-gliders – and, because he had the sort of shoulders that could cope with an errant rocket engine yanking his arm the wrong way, hit on a solution most people wouldn’t have dared try. Caroline saw an imbalance in the way women were represented in British public life – in the Fawcett case, it was a jog through Parliament Square that prompted action – and decided to address it.

And then they both did something. For Caroline, it was setting up an online petition, then working with a solicitor to write to the Bank Of England, calling it out for falling short of a duty as a public body to ensure equality. For Richard, it was buying some aluminium tubes off Amazon and angle-grinding them together to make a prototype casing for an arm-rocket. The first thing, quite often, is the hardest thing: it’s the thing that gets things going, that takes you from an idea to a project, from ‘Wouldn’t it be better if…’ to ‘How can I make this happen?’ After that, the other stuff – having meetings with the director of notes at the Bank Of England, welding a jet engine to your new casing: that follows. It’s fine-tuning and keeping the momentum going. You can’t start by daydreaming about how cool it would be to fly around at a Red Bull-sponsored air event, or to have people telling you that their daughters learned about Millicent Fawcett today: you have to start with the first thing. 

That’s my take, anyway. So here’s a challenge for you: whether you want to change the world, or just change yourself, start with what you have and do the first thing: the step you can take today that will lead to bigger, better things down the road. Use the skills you have, in the areas you’re interested in. Make things better. Change the world. Be a superhero.

Just don’t wear spandex. It looks stupid.

HOMEWORK: Grab a bit of paper and write down a huge goal you have, then make it smaller. Work back and back and back until you hit a first step you can take today. Do that step. And then do the next one. You’re on the way.

Wait, come back!

Let’s rephrase: the problem with conventional dictionaries is, they’re too slow. Assuming you’re reading something online, it never takes more than about ten seconds to cut-and-paste any word you come up against, stick it into your preferred search engine, and be presented with more information than you can ever possibly use on almost anything you could be wondering about. If you’re on an e-reader this might be even faster: even if you’re reading a conventional book, your phone’s probably by your side.

Assuming, then, that you aren’t either a) Going somewhere wi-fi free and taking a dictionary with you, or almost as likely b) Operating in some sort of post-apocalyptic wilderness where the internet no longer exists (in which case you’ve probably got other things to worry about), what’s the point in dictionaries?

Simple: to expose yourself to the words you don’t know you don’t know.

Probably, when you were a kid, you browsed a dictionary at least once, mouth agape at words that you might only ever use if you became an academic, obstetrician, or Scrabble champion. Maybe you found a word or phrase that stuck with you: that you still use, years later, to impress dates or job interviewers or potential clients, or just because it enriches your own life to think with the kind of clarity that a bigger vocabulary provides.

That’s what I wrote The Dictionary Of Muscle for. 

I’ve been lifting seriously for about a decade, training (and sometimes competing) in pretty much every strength sport out there, and trying out a tonne of different systems, methods, movements, programmes, whatever. Because I’m a completist, I always wanted a comprehensive book about how all this stuff fits together, a place where you could be exposed to (almost) everything the training world has to offer, and then decide what to try.

But that didn’t exist, so I had to write it myself.

The Dictionary Of Muscle isn’t for looking words up, but for browsing: for starting out at A or C or X and having a quick read, looking for the ideas and training systems and concepts that you don’t know you don’t know about. Maybe you’re new to lifting, and you’ve never heard of Prilepin’s Chart or 5/3/1: in which case it’s a good primer in what’s bro-science and what actually works. Maybe you’ve been training a while and you’re looking for something new but you don’t know exactly what: hopefully, you’ll find it in the entries for more obscure methodologies like Korte’s 3×3 and Smolov Jr, or by challenging yourself to tackle new lifts like the two-hands-anyhow or the Dinnie Stones. Maybe you’re a serious veteran of bodybuilding or strongman or powerlifting or Olympic weightlifting, but you’d like to be able to hold your own in a chat about training principles with guys (and ladies) from the other disciplines, as well as keeping up with what the youngsters are all talking about with their hashtags and their HIFT training and their undulating conjugate periodisation. Or maybe, just maybe, you just love lifting in all its forms, and you want to know as much about it as you can.

That’s what The Dictionary Of Muscle is for. 

You can buy it here: it’s on Kindle, but if you don’t have one of those you can just download the app to your smartphone/tablet/computer/whatever and read it there.

I don’t advertise on Live Hard, and I don’t do sponsored posts (you would not believe the nonsense I get offered) or financially-motivated ‘reviews’, so this is actually the first thing I’ve done via the site that actually involves money. So if you think it might help you in your training – or when you start training – please do pick up a copy. If you don’t think it’s for you, but you know people who might like it, I’d appreciate a share – of this post, or the direct link to the book. And if neither of the above apply, no worries – just keep reading the site, and normal service will be resumed shortly. Live Hard!

HOMEWORK: Well, I’m not telling you to buy the book. Just go find out something you don’t know.

This was a mistake.

MacLeod devotes an entire part of his book to fear of falling, because – as he says – it’s probably the real problem. ‘Humans,’ he points out, ‘Are not hardwired to deal with fear of falling in an objective way. In most climbing situations that occur, sport climbing indoors or out…falling off is, comparatively speaking, exceptionally safe. Yet for more than half of us it’s a terrifying thought.’ This leads to less-than-optimal results in insidious ways: to climbers staying in their comfort zone and trying to climb routes statically that really should be tackled dynamically, making for an inefficient experience and a negative feedback loop. And the only way to break this loop, says MacLeod, is to practice falling. A lot.

Like I say, I should have probably picked up on the parallels sooner.

Failing, like falling, is a hardwired fear for most of us. For most of our hunter-gathering history, rejection and public defeat were genuinely life-threatening problems. Make a mistake, get socially rejected, embarrass yourself in front of the only dozen people you knew in the world, and you might suddenly find yourself abandoned on the plains, with nobody to look out for wild animals or help you make fire. Come at the chief, you best not miss.

Of course, this isn’t the case any more, and you probably know already that this is why you shouldn’t fear failure. But there’s a difference between knowing it and knowing it – between being rationally convinced that sending that pitch, making that call, talking to that one person isn’t going to be the end of the world, and feeling it in your primitive ape-reptile brain.

This is where MacLeod comes back in.

The way to stop being afraid of falling, says MacLeod, is ‘to clock up falls – and not just one or two; hundreds.’

‘Even tough most climbers do make an effort to step out of their comfort zone, go for it a bit more and take some practice falls, their mistake is not to do it enough,’ he writes. ‘Most people will practice falls for one session and then forget about it. The effect is noticeable, but it doesn’t last…practice falls day in, day out for months and years. Using myself as an example, 5-10 leader falls per session for a year was enough to break the fear.’ For. A. Year.  

There’s a different between knowing it and knowing it.

Why You Should Aim For 100 Rejections A Year, by Kim Liao, is an excellent take on why collecting failures will help you reframe the process, improve your pitching and – probably – lead to more acceptance, and you should definitely read it. But also think about this: Eric Kandel, who won the Nobel Prize in the year 2000, showed at the molecular level that repeated confrontation that does not result in the expected consequences leads to potassium molecules at the synapses changing in such a way that stimulation is reduced with each repetition. Ivan Pavlov, who got his Nobel in 1904, used the same process, without understanding it, to cure his dogs of a fear of water after they nearly drowned in a flood. By confronting your fears and teaching your brain that rejection doesn’t mean freezing to death on a wind-blasted plain, you are rewiring your brain to be better suited to the modern world.

Like I said, it took me a while. But I’ve realised I’m not failing enough.

HOMEWORK: Fail at least three times this week. And if you’ve already read 9 Out Of 10 Climbers, read Your Brain Knows More Than You Think: it’s not quite as good, but almost nothing is.

“I dunno, bro, maybe, like, learn to speak a bunch of different languages so that I could bang foreign chicks? Then I’d work out how to count cards and learn to predict the stock markets, and, and, I dunno, maybe learn the piano?”

“Shit yeah son, the piano is hella smart! Hey, let me get another hit on that beer bong.”

That, I like to imagine, is how the early script meeting went for Limitless, a stupid film for stupid people about what it must be like to be the smartest guy in the world. Or maybe a stupid film for slightly smarter people about what it would be like to be a douchebro convinced by the magic of chemistry that he’s way smarter than he actually is? Right at the start Bradley Cooper claims that he has a four-digit IQ and I’m pretty sure that’s medically insane – so either he’s dangerously deluded and it’s a cautionary fable, or nobody working on the film really cared either way. It’s confusing, but the one thing I think we can all agree on is that anyone who found Limitless aspirational is not a guy you want to make eye contact with in a bar.

Let’s review:

Limitless is a film about a hopeless non-writer with an inexplicably hot (ex)-girlfriend who lucks his way into a stash of drugs that make him hella smart. You don’t need to know the science part, but it’s instructive that the film falls back on the old ‘It lets you use 100% of your brain instead of 20’ trope, because it shows you just how lazy the writing is – TL;DR, the brain is insanely metabolically expensive, and there is no way evolution would allow gigantic parts of it to go unused. And so anyway what the drug actually does is to allow Bradders to instantly recall and systematize everything he’s ever learned, as well as…I’m not sure, be really observant, like Sherlock Holmes or Spider-Man? Bradders, of course, knows that with great power comes great responsi…no, I’m joking, he uses it to have sex with strangers and make a load of money and mansplain things so well that people actually like him for it, all while making a series of non-financial calculations so a) Stupid or b) Morally questionable that you have to figure this is going to play out as a tragedy. Spoilers: it fucking doesn’t.

Please understand: this is a wish-fulfilment fantasy about what idiots think it’s like to be clever. If the Coopster’s command of foreign languages isn’t enough (he uses it entirely to talk to wait staff), look at the bit where he impresses a bunch of hedgefund managers with some trivia he’s memorised off Wikipedia: it sounds clever, it has big concepts and words in, and so everyone likes him. There’s even a scene where it emerges that he can fight impossibly well because he once watched some Bruce Lee films and a bunch of self-defence videos. Take that, thousand-year-tradition of martial arts: all we need now is those chemist assholes to get themselves in gear, and those hours we spent flipping through YouTube are going to pay off like gangbusters. He doesn’t once do anything that really redefines the boundaries of intelligence, like invent a radically more efficient hydrogen-powered engine or cure cancer or come up with a grand theory of physics that unifies general relativity and quantum mechanics: he’s too busy banging chicks. He’s Will Hunting with a forty dollar haircut and absolutely no empathy, and by the end (spoilers!) he’s a senator on the road to becoming president. Oh, and in case you’re worrying that he might learn something, he even gets the girl back.

But why am I talking about this here?

Here’s why: because the moral of Limitless is that you should never worry about changing yourself, or trying hard at anything. It is a film about how you are already awesome, and everyone else is an asshole for not realising that. “It works better if you’re already smart,” explains the drug dealer who gives Bradders the pill: this is why he triumphs over all the other people who take it and why you, the viewer, don’t need to worry about applying yourself to anything and settling in for the long grind. Consider that, at the start of the film, Coops The Novelist has not written one fucking word of a book that he has already somehow been paid an advance for: not a shitty first draft, not a couple of chapters, not anything. He’s waiting, you see, for inspiration to strike, and fuck Stephen King and Anthony Trollope for suggesting that just sitting down and writing some words might be a better idea. You are special, goes the message: you already have everything you need, locked away deep inside you. You just need to find the right PUA forum/get really into nootropics/buy a workout plan that wasn’t designed by assholes, and then you can finally get started and show everyone. “It works better if you’re already smart.” Of course it does.

The problem with Limitless is the same as the problem with the Matrix, and Wanted, and every other male fantasy film where the hero gets something for nothing and also the girl: nothing in life works like that. The real-life science is piling up to confirm what real-life smart people already know: the grind that it takes to achieve real-life things is probably more important than the things themselves. Maybe one day someone will invent a pill that lets you learn Italian, or teaches you kung fu, or gives you flawless eight-pack abs, but that barely matters, because the process of getting there will teach you to get better at other things. At the very least, it might teach you not to be an asshole. But, of course, the only person who comes close to delivering this lesson in the film is Robert DeNiro, and (spoilers!) Bradley puts a stop to that shit by bankrupting his company and predicting that he’s going to have a heart attack.

Limitless is an awful film, but don’t feel awful if you liked it. Instead, please remember that nothing worthwhile comes without effort, and that the effort itself builds its own rewards. That starting something, today, is better than waiting for the perfect conditions before you tidy your room or do some situps or sit down to write your masterwork. And that, someday, there might be a pill that makes you smarter: but by starting right now, you’ll be way ahead of the assholes that take it. Oh, and: you don’t need to be a genius to play the fucking piano.

HOMEWORK: Read Angela Duckworth’s ‘Grit’, a beautiful book about the power of struggle that defines genius as ‘Working towards excellence, ceaselessly, with every element of your being.’ Tidy your room. Do a one-minute plank. Write some words. Don’t worry about whether you’re already smart: it works either way.