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One thing I have learned as a competitor is that there are clear distinctions between what it takes to be decent, what it takes to be good, what it takes to be great, and what it takes to be among the best. If your goal is to be mediocre, then you have a considerable margin for error. You can get depressed when fired and mope around waiting for someone to call with a new job offer. If you hurt your toe, you can take six weeks watching television and eating potato chips. In line with that mind-set, most people think of injuries as setbacks, something they have to recover from or deal with. From the outside, for fans or spectators, an injured athlete is in purgatory, hovering in an impotent state between competing and sitting on the bench. In my martial arts life, every time I tweak my body, well-intended people like my mother suggest I take a few weeks off training. What they don’t realize is that if I were to stop training whenever something hurt, I would spend my whole year on the couch. Almost without exception, I am back on the mats the next day, figuring out how to use my new situation to heighten elements of my game. If I want to be the best, I have to take risks others would avoid, always optimizing the learning potential of the moment and turning adversity to my advantage.
The Art of Learning
Josh Waitzkin
The goal here is honing the ability to feel the stressor on the inhale and release the stressor during the exhale while breathing at your resonance frequency. You want to imagine the stressor and try to re-create its emotional effects within your body—the unease, the anxiety, the frustration—as you slowly inhale. Your train was delayed underground and you spent your commute frantically but unsuccessfully trying to text your colleagues to let them know? Feel that irritation as you breathe in. Connect to it. Try to remember how annoyed, helpless, and on edge you felt. And on the exhale? Let it go. Release the frustration; feel it escape through your mouth as you breathe out, like steam escaping when you crack a lid on a pot of boiling water.
Heart Breath Mind
Leah Lagos
I wanted to know where Nebraska came from, what it led to. It sat between two of Springsteen’s most celebrated recordings, in its own quiet and turmoil. He described it to me as “an accident start to finish” but also as the album that “still might be [his] best.” The recording came from a place and a time in which Springsteen was facing troubles in his life, troubles that had no name as of yet. Wordsworth defines poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings…recollected in tranquillity.” Quite differently, Nebraska came from the middle of that “overflow,” was not a thing “recollected in tranquillity.” It came from the heart of trouble and led to still more, its stark character the lasting reward.
Deliver Me From Nowhere
Warren Zanes
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