… It was a small house and the phone woke us all up. I was thirteen years old and my cousin (and also my role-model) had killed himself. His mother was a schizophrenic who had also killed herself. My musical idol Kurt Cobain had also just killed himself. My dad was an alcoholic.
All this made me wonder … was life worth living?
I held a razor-blade to my own wrists before I was old enough to shave. By seventeen I was an alcoholic myself. Later I was sex addicted, drug addicted and got traumatised in six war-zones. I have since been in crushing multi-million pound financial debt, got divorced and had tape worms crawl out of my arse for months on end, while my mother writhed with cancer next door. I don’t recommend any of these things.
I’ve taught at CERN, Google and in The House of Lords. I’ve seen some shit in Afghanistan, The Middle East and Sierra Leone. I’ve been around mate.
I have also always sought something…beyond this place, beyond this fallen world. I visited Christian sites in Israel at 15, and studied meditation and yoga in India at 16 to find that something. In both places I had had experiences that I couldn’t then explain.
I’ve sought meaning in books, drugs and in more smoking hot Slavic women than you’d believe. I’ve lived in monasteries, retreat centres and martial arts dojos. I’ve studied psychology and philosophy at university level. I’ve been a millionaire and lost it all. I’ve lived in the slums of Brazil and Ethiopia, and worked with some of the richest people in the world in the Alps and in the corporate world. I’ve kissed a princess, worked with 30,000 kids, and coached movie stars you’d know.
Martial arts helped me a lot (I was a live-in student for three years), groups of drunks helped me a lot (I’m now 19 years sober), Buddhism and meditation helped me a lot. Spending a lot of time in the quietude of nature helped a lot. Starting a business was crucial for me to grow up, which surprised me. I was lucky enough to have some great mentors, three of whom let me live with them for a while when I was homeless.
Today I am fit, happy and by my own and other’s terms, successful. People ask for my advice, thousands study with me globally, and family and neighbours trust me with their kids. I run a company doing what I love which has taken me around the world, hold some random world records, and hold a lovely Italian girl every night. I’m generally flourishing by any measure. The trauma education charity I started in Ukraine has helped hundreds of thousands of people, and my podcast and Youtube channels have reached millions.
I don’t say these things to boast, I say them as I am astounded it was possible. As a young man I would have scoffed at the possibility. At heart I am still a screw-up, and really did not expect to live this long, so I’ve got sympathy for those going through hard times that don’t seem to have an off ramp. This book is to help who I was when I was younger.
It now seems that more and more young men have the problems that I had – addiction, despair, lack of purpose – so this is my attempt to be of service. It’s what I’ve learnt about the state we find ourselves in today as men, and how to survive it. This book is concentrated from pain so it can lessen pain. I bet it will save you time and tears.This is the book that my cousin needed. I sometimes joke that as an ADHD addict with PTSD, I was just prepping for what everyone is going through now. #earlyadopter #beforeitwascool
If you’re a bloke wondering if life is worth living, thinks it’s all bullshit, and know that you need…well…SOMETHING, then read on. This book is an answer. This book contains, if not the meaning to life, then a good map and a solid set of practices to find it. It likely won’t all make sense on the first reading and isn’t meant to, but it will give anyone some very useful pointers.
Oh, and I didn’t really write this book. This may sound wild, but it wrote itself one weekend, then I just edited it with a friend. I just sat down and it came out, then every day at 5am something would wake me up to go refine it.
Some of it is just a gathering of ideas from smarter men than me – Siddhartha, Nietzsche, Wilber, Linden, Vervaeke – these are the main ones, but there’s literally hundreds of others. I’ve been lucky enough to have met and studied with most of the top people in the personal growth world today, and this book condenses their work and also at least 1,000 books that I’ve read. I try to credit them after each chapter, but honestly I’ve been studying meaning for twenty years, so I forget where lots of things I know come from. a lot came from practices not people. There is blood, sweat and tears in these pages.
Some words (in green) I just made up and you’ll have to work them out. Parts are just the bad poetry of a man who took too many drugs as a child, so don’t stress if you don’t understand it all. That being said, there are also sections of simple: “do this if you want to live”, advice based on my experience in the trenches, 2500 years of philosophy, and the best science of human flourishing available. I’ve interviewed over 600 experts, and surveyed the available scientific research so I’m not JUST pulling it out my nut sack.
If you take on and practise 5% of what’s in it, it will save your life.
This book concentrates the best that I have found, and I think the best the world has to offer on mental health and finding meaning. It’s a huge risk to my income and even to my liberty to publish it in this day and age, but I think it’s worth it. This is my life’s work so let them kill me for it if they want. I would die for this book. I will not lie to you in any event.
This book concentrates the best that I have found, and I think the best the world has to offer on mental health and finding meaning. It’s a huge risk to my income and even to my liberty to publish it in this day and age, but I think it’s worth it. This is my life’s work so let them kill me for it if they want. I would die for this book. I will not lie to you in any event. Like what you see? By the book here!