This post is part of a virtual book tour organized by Goddess Fish Promotions. David Amerland will be awarding a $25 Amazon/BN GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour. Click on the tour banner to see the other stops on the tour.
What is your favorite book that you have written (Published or Unpublished), and why?
As a writer, each book, I’ve written last is my favorite. Those with a slightly cynical turn of mind will think, “well, what’d you expect? This is, after all, a book promotional tour” which is true, so I am bound to mention Intentional: How to Live, Love, Work and Play Meaningfully. But the promotional aspect of it is not why I’m mentioning it. I mention it because a book represents a collection of thoughts that have been given a structured form which now makes them ordered and better understood. And, a journey of discovery during which the writer will have to make creative choices that will impact the reader. In their totality these two things commandeer the writer’s attention and recent memories. If you ask me what I can remember of the last three years it is Intentional and how exciting it was to research and write and how difficult it was to decide what to include and how to say it and what to leave out. I remember the sleepless nights as I wrangled with studies that stretched my understanding of chemistry and physics and the days when I wrote words that excited me to read afterwards.
So, can I now be truly objective? Can I measure this current book against the last one, now six years in the past, or the ones before that recede further back in time? Memories fade. So those books are barely there for me in terms of effort and difficulty which means I can’t truly compare them and if I say I can I can guarantee you it is a lie.
What I can compare perhaps is how well each book sold, but then this would also make the comparison unfair. My books tend to keep on selling well past the first two-three years from the date of their publication and that disadvantages every new book I want to promote which has not yet started to reach peak sales.
My attention now is focused on Intentional. I love it. I love what I did with it. I love the challenge it presents when I have to explain it. When I say it is my favorite book I am being honest. I’m also being honest when I say that three years from now I will most likely have a new favorite book to talk about.
What prompted you to write about your topic?
Every book I write can be summed down to a one-line question that represents the problem it is there to solve. Intentional: How to Live, Love, Work and Play Meaningfully was written to answer the seemingly simple question of “How do I behave in each encounter/situation in my life so as to move towards my goals?” The answer to this, of course, is not quite as succinct otherwise I wouldn’t have written 200 plus pages to explain it.
The question of behavior that is evidence of choices and decisions, beliefs and values, mindset and attitude is something that has always fascinated me. It amazes me when I do specific things, for instance, or worse still, I am expected to do specific things because of who people think I am or what they believe I represent. The way we behave is anchored to the foundations of who we think we are and who we believe we can become. Intentional is the key that helps you unlock all this for yourself, at a personal level. It is a guide more than a prescription which makes it unique to each reader.
Who influenced you to write a book (or books)?
I’m a writer so writing a book is something that I do. But writing as a way of creating structure and adding meaning to the world is also part of who I am and how I think. So the odd answer here is that no one influenced me but, at the same time, every book I have read, every book I have written, every study I have taken apart and sought to understand, have played a role in the writing of this book.
Do you have a favorite author? Or someone who inspired you to write a book (Or books)?
I read a lot of very different fiction and non-fiction books so there is no author I can single out as a flat-out favorite. However two non-fiction authors with an almost antithetical approach to choosing topics and doing research which I like – a lot – are James Gleick (who writes science-backed books) and Sebastian Junger (who uses experience in lieu of research to present complex, wider issues really well).
What are your hobbies other than writing?
I’ve been training in martial arts since I was 13. I hold a 1st Dan black belt in WTF Tae Kwon Do and a 2nd Dan black belt in ITF Tae Kwon Do. I’m a black belt in Wado Ryu Karate and have done judo and boxing and Wing Chun Kung Fu. I train, on average, 10 hours each week and that soaks up all of stress, angst, anxiety and worries. The pandemic made me create a fully-equipped home gym along with sparring dummies and punch bags and it’s where I spend my spare time, each day.
What is one thing in your life that you would say has had the greatest impact on your writing? Or in your life in general?
My readers have been central to both my writing and my life. There were times when I felt that my writing was not good enough, that my books don’t have a sufficiently broad appeal, that what I am writing is all wrong and that I should maybe just stop. Each time I have felt like this, almost without fail I receive an email or a long comment on one of my social media posts from readers I have never interacted with telling me just how much my writing helped them solve a work-related issue about their business, or understand something truly deep about their life. When I am down these comments help me pick myself up and go on doing what I do. When I am OK, of course, they terrify me and I try not to think too much about the burden of responsibility they engender.
What is the most difficult part about writing for you?
The halfway mark of every, single book I have ever written. It is the point where I truly think about jacking everything in and joining a monastery as an option to living life. But, these days, I know this is going to happen to me. I have worked out my own personal survival strategies that help me not just to weather the storm, so to speak, but to actually use its energy to thrive.
How do you research for your book(s)?
Once I have a subject in mind I always need to know whether there is a body of research that is big enough to support it and modern enough to not be out of date? I have a membership with The British Library and I can access their catalogue from virtually anywhere. I belong to a couple of academic institutions whose digital libraries are my first point of contact for research material. I then use Google Scholar to discover things I might have missed and Academia to see who is working on fresh material and why. By the time I’ve done all that the subject matter begins to crystalize in my head so this is part of the writing process for me.
Which one do you prefer, Coffee or Tea? What type of Coffee or Tea is your favorite? Or do you prefer another type of drink?
I always choose coffee over tea. I have a Sage Barista Touch coffee maker. I grind organic coffee beans each morning for that extra espresso jolt, taken black with no sugar. At one point I used to drink so much coffee I was convinced my blood type was the brand of coffee I used. I am now down to four-five cups a day and I drink the last one before 6.00pm.
Lastly, what was your favorite book growing up?
I loved them all! Each one I read seemed better and bigger in my mind than the one before. Was there a book that shaped my thinking as a young adult? Yeah, Frank Herbert’s Dune trilogy (at the time) which in typical fashion I read in reverse. It made me realize that the true raw material of everything is the human mind and its willingness to train the body into a tool that has purpose in the universe. Funny, right, because in its own way that is what Intentional is all about. I read The Children of Dune, Dune Messiah and, finally Dune, in 1977. Intentional, written more than half a century later, shows how the science of the present can make at least some aspects of the science fiction of the past real. Now that I’ve written that I think that maybe Intentional is not that original, after all, but then again one of the central premises of my book is that “Nothing is truly original, … everything is borrowed from somewhere else and made to fit the moment and its time.” So, here we are. Full circle. With a twist.
What stops us from getting all that is the complexity of our brain and the complicated way in which the external world comes together. The misalignment between the internal states we experience and the external circumstances we encounter often leads to confusion, a lack of clarity in our thinking and actions that are not consistent with our professed values.
Intentional is a gameplan. It helps us connect the pieces of our mind to the pieces of our life. It shows us how to map what we feel to what has caused those feelings, understand what affects us and what effects it has on us and determine what we want, why we want it and what we need to do to get it.
When we know what to do, we know how to behave. When we know how to behave we know how to act. When we know how to act, we know how to live. Our actions, each day, become our lives. Drawn from the latest research from the fields of neuroscience, behavioral and social psychology and evolutionary anthropology, Intentional shows you how to add meaning to your actions and lead a meaningful, happier, more fulfilling life on your terms.
From a conceptual perspective history is easy to read. The 19th century was all about industrialization. We harnessed machines to augment manual labor by many degrees of magnitude. The 20th century was about achieving efficiencies of scale so the machines that create our goods could run better and produce more at lower cost. The 21st century is about resilience as the production hubs and supply networks we have created are stress-tested to the limit.
The global pandemic that started in the closing months of 2019 acted as a catalyst that accelerated change everywhere. The additional environmental and psychological pressure it piled up became a scalpel that exposed all our weaknesses. The one attribute that would perhaps have allowed us all to weather the Covid-19 storm better, that would have allowed our systems of governance and systems of trade to weather it better: resilience, appeared to be missing from our arsenal. Interestingly, this is where values come in.
There is a chain of causal attributes we need to work our way through now. For example, we can’t talk about values without tackling personality and we can’t tackle personality without discussing traits.
Traits, in turn, affect goals, motivation and behavior. We need to spell out the difference between personality and character, two qualities that are often used interchangeably, and we also must define the difference between traits and values which are also two qualities that are also misunderstood and are often used interchangeably.
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ReplyDeleteSounds like a great book.
ReplyDeleteThe book sounds very interesting. Thanks!
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