TN50#127, What’s It All About? 08 August 2023

Hi Team,

Happy Tuesday and welcome to The Next 50 #127.  I like to think of personal performance in 3 components: physical, mental and emotional.  My frameworks focus on 4 Buckets: Eat, Sleep, Move and Think.  This blog is my sandbox for sharing information that you might find useful for your personal performance.

Have you ever thought: What’s it all about?  I am on day 8 of helping a family member empty a home with over 50 years of life and love and lose and laughter inside; as well as tons of photos, cat ashes and plastic flowers.  Is that what it’s all about?  It definitely is for the person who is transitioning from that home.  For me, not so much, but I probably share a decent amount of overlap, maybe more than I even understand at this point in my life.

On day 7 of this adventure (yesterday) one of my favorite podcasters launched the 4th author interview in what I would call the Attia – “What’s It All About” Series.

Here’s the backstory, Peter Attia credits 4 books with capturing his current thought process regarding the “what’s it all about?” question, he also gifts these 4 books the most often.  One key difference between Peter and I is that I am a Jesus guy which makes me a super natural, immortal guy.  Peter is not in alignment with me on this and as a mere mortal we come at the “what’s it all about?” question differently.  All that being said though, I was/am very intrigued by these same 4 books and I believe that all 4 of the books offer a lot to everyone on this side of the pavement; regardless of their thoughts about eternity.  I read 3 of these books before Peter interviewed the authors, here are the 4 books:

  1. Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman
  2. Die With Zero, Bill Perkins (first heard about this book on The Drive, Attia’s podcast)
  3. From Strength to Strength, Author Brooks
  4. Stillness Is the Key, Ryan Holiday

I’ll say it again, I highly recommend reading (audibling) all 4 of these books.

I would also recommend that all of you listen to the 4 podcast interviews of the authors from The Drive.  And what kind of recommender would I be without providing links?

  1. Oliver Burkeman, ep. 265
  2. Bill Perkins, ep. 237
  3. Author Brooks, ep. 226
  4. Ryan Holiday, ep. 90

These 4 interviews will answer some of the questions you’ll most likely have from the books, Attia does a great job digging into the books, their substance and the authors.

The last 8 days have been eye opening and I have a lot to consider about my own life, my family, my friends and my clients.  This house and the circumstances surrounding the clean-up hold an amazing story and an amazing set of lessons, if I can just make the time and give my self the space to capture them.

Based on the timing of yesterday’s podcast episode I will be revisiting these 4 books, starting with Four Thousand Weeks.  You might think this is silly but in my world view, things happen for a reason; we just need to slow down enough to catch them, which I don’t always do.  As I learn what I’m suppose to learn I’ll try to share my lessons with all of you in a useful way.

 As always share the post with your team and anyone who might find it useful and let me know what you think!

Have a good one, Alex

PS. Do you or someone you know need a personal performance coach, let me know: alex@fpp.llc