Welcome to The MHB Podcast. This is Michael Baun. And welcome to my 176th episode. In this episode I want to teach you how to be ready for whatever. I mean as ready as you can possibly be for any situation life might throw at you. So much of whether or not you will have a good life depends on your readiness. It depends on whether you keep yourself sharp. If you allow yourself to atrophy or become complacent, then you won’t be ready when great opportunities present themselves and you’ll always be caught off guard by adversity. When it comes to being prepared for life there are four major domains I want you to focus on. Each of these areas feeds into the others so to neglect one of them will undermine the rest. Keeping yourself sharpened and continuously growing in these areas is not optional if you want to have a good life. But if you’re able to work on these things consistently and with an eye for improvement the possibilities for what you can accomplish are limitless. The four pillars of fitness you must work on for the rest of your life are intellectual fitness, physical fitness, emotional fitness, and social fitness.
First let’s consider intellectual fitness. The two keys to intellectual fitness are having as much useful knowledge as possible and doing all you can to diminish your ignorance of important topics. Now think about what I said here. I didn’t say intellectual fitness involves filling your mind with trivia. I didn’t say intellectual fitness requires you to know a lot about everything either. Intellectual fitness is focused on you knowing what you need to know to walk effectively through your life. So much of the pain you experience in life is a direct consequence of not knowing what you needed to know. A flat tire in the middle of nowhere is a lot scarier and far more dangerous for a person who knows nothing about changing a tire. Being a parent carries tremendous risk of leading your child astray if you know nothing about proper child development. Having a good marriage is much more difficult when you’re fully ignorant of conflict resolution strategies and the dynamics of human relations. All of these are fields of knowledge which are highly relevant to your well-being. It’s not a good idea to simply wing it and learn everything on the fly because doing so carries a much greater likelihood of unnecessary and painful failures.
Another reason why intellectual fitness is important is that it protects you against pathological belief structures or ideologies. A person has to be woefully ignorant before they become caught up in a low-resolution ideology. An ideology is an over-simplified way of viewing the world which fails to account for the rich nuance and complexities of reality. Political ideologies like woke far-leftism become more prevalent and spread more easily as societies allow their intellectual fitness to atrophy. Living in accordance to low-resolution ideology is a bad idea because you’ll be blind to important details about the world which will cause you to stumble and fall in painful ways. It’s always better to invest your time and intellectual resources in studying a situation at a deeper level if doing so allows you to be correct in your judgments. You can’t know everything and there’s only so much time in the day so you have to use discernment and pick your battles.
The best ways to increase your intellectual fitness are to read, write, and consume content. A small room full of books is not a small room at all – rather it’s a portal into many worlds. You need not depend on expensive universities in order to become educated. With the right library of books you are in the company of intellectual giants. I suggest you search for highly regarded books on psychology and human relations. This genre of reading will help sharpen you in the social fitness category as well which you’ll learn is an indispensable part of living a good life. Obviously you should be reading the Bible everyday and praying for your absorption of its infinite wisdom.
You should also read history. Most people measure themselves against their own community to determine whether or not they’re doing the right things. But imagine if your community expanded into many civilizations and transcended the limitations of time. That’s what happens when you study history. If there’s a tragic mistake you could make in your life, chances are someone else has already made it in the past and learned from it. You should search the annals of history to find these lessons and incorporate them into your intellectual fitness. Contrary to popular belief, ignorance is not bliss. Ignorance is pain and unnecessary misery inflicted on yourself and those around you. If you want to have a good life you must humble yourself and realize how much you don’t yet know. You must also resist the temptation to become authoritarian in the things you think you know. After all, what we don’t know gets us into trouble – but what we know for sure that just isn’t so is far more dangerous.
I also want to mention the value of podcasts here. Podcasting is like a Gutenberg revolution because it grants us access to what is called found time. You can’t read a book while you’re washing dishes or driving to work. But you can listen to podcasts while doing both of these things. Listening to podcasts is a phenomenal way to develop your intellectual fitness. In some ways it’s even more effective than reading. I think ultimately reading wins the day because reading a book gives you access to the authors refined thoughts. If you read a good book, you’re consuming information the author has thought long and hard about. When you listen to a podcast it can sometimes be off-the-cuff conversations which require you to sort the wheat from the chaff. With that said, listening to podcasts might make it easier for you to absorb information than you can by reading. Human beings have an ancient history of oral tradition which extends far beyond the written word. Some have argued our capacity for speech and ability to listen extends beyond our reading comprehension because of this oral tradition.
When it comes to your intellectual fitness you also want to make sure you write as much as possible. I’ve written somewhere north of 700,000 words since I started The MHB Podcast. Writing is important for your mind because it helps you to codify your knowledge and keep it straight. Writing will also improve your ability to speak because it helps to develop your vocabulary. Writing also helps your brain store information in a way which makes it easier for you to recall it in any given moment. An important part of intellectual fitness is having as much relevant information internalized as possible so that you can use it when making critical daily decisions. Always remember that willful ignorance is not okay and often it’s downright unsafe. You owe it to yourself and to your loved ones to ward off complacency and do all you can to further develop your mind. Stop consuming content that is vacuous or meaningless for what you value in life. Instead of allowing yourself to become addicted to outrage or other empty content, focus on areas which will provide benefit for yourself now and in the future.
Next let’s talk about physical fitness. I used to think I could get by without taking this area of fitness seriously. I thought if I was smart enough I’d be successful despite poor physical fitness. I was completely wrong about that. It turns out the best way to preserve your brain against cognitive decline is through cardiovascular exercise and weight training. It’s also the case that maintaining a high level of physical fitness results in the development of mental toughness as well. It takes a lot of mental toughness to get up early in the morning and push through a difficult workout. But if you’re able to develop this mental toughness then it will serve you in places far beyond the gym. Mental toughness will help you work harder than those around you and persevere through adversity. Hard work and perseverance are probably the two most significant factors in determining whether a person will be successful in life. These two qualities are inextricably linked to mental toughness – and mental toughness is linked to physical fitness.
It’s also the case that being physically fit will win you the respect of the people around you upon first impression. I say upon first impression because even a fit person can act like an idiot and lose the respect of people. But when someone knows nothing about you and they see that you’re physically fit, they’re going to start off the relationship from a different perspective than they would otherwise. Being fit will also make other areas of your life much easier. Walking to your car, carrying groceries, and climbing up stairs all become far easier once you are fit. You’ll also have more energy and so your productivity will likely increase.
There’s also something to be said about physical fitness when it comes to readiness. Life is full of dangerous things which will hurt or kill you if you’re not ready for them. The more fit you are the less likely you will be caught off guard. You never know when God is going to open the door of a great opportunity and being physically fit will make you all the more ready to seize that opportunity. A consistent regimen of physical workouts also makes you resilient against disorders like depression and anxiety. Good science supports the reality of your brain chemistry responding positively to physical exertion. Furthermore, almost all of your positive emotion is associated with observing yourself move towards a desired goal. Few activities capture this process quite as well as working out and observing the results happen. If you’re physically fit you’re more likely to survive accidents and you’ll be able to respond more effectively when tragedy strikes your life – and be certain tragedy will strike your life.
To become physically fit I recommend you purchase a membership at a gym you like and build a long play list of music that gets you going. You should do a combination of high intensity cardiovascular work and weight training. You should prioritize the weight training over the cardiovascular work but you shouldn’t shirk the cardio entirely. Don’t worry so much about restricting the quantity of food you eat, instead focus on filling your diet with protein and healthy fats with some whole carbs as well. You should aim to get your body weight in grams of protein each day. Drink protein shakes to supplement if you have to. You need to do some research on how your muscle groups are organized so you can hit each one repeatedly with various movements. It’s a learning process but it’s absolutely worth it. It also helps to hire a good personal trainer and it’s worth the money. Life is hard – the only way to make it less difficult is to train yourself to be excellent at conquering hard things.
Now let’s talk about emotional fitness. This area of fitness is closely associated with mental toughness. One of the keys to emotional fitness is developing solid routines which you can perform even when you aren’t feeling motivated or happy. I think it’s important to develop these routines because they will keep you moving and keep your productivity up even during difficult seasons of life. When the bottom falls out of your life and chaos rushes in to destroy your emotional well-being – it’s your commitment to routines which determines how well you will come out of it. Solid routines bring a sense of order and security even during periods of life when you have neither of these things.
Stress and anxiety are closely associated with needing to deal with more than you can possibly handle. If you’re trying to solve too many problems at one time you’ll decrease your chances of solving any of them. Instead you should break your life down into small, manageable pieces and develop routines which appropriately address each piece you’d like to improve on. If you’re in the midst of terrible pain, grief, or suffering then it can be helpful to shorten your time-frame. This means only focusing on how you’re going to get through the next ten minutes rather than concerning yourself with the next week or month.
Another major factor when it comes to emotional fitness is the quality of sleep you are getting. Good sleep is not optional. If you allow yourself to become sleep deprived you will begin to suffer in all of the areas we are talking about. Exhaustion can turn even the bravest, most well-put-together individual into a fool. To help yourself sleep better at night I recommend not eating anything within two hours of your sleep time. It’s also helpful to make sure you’re using up every ounce of energy you have throughout the day. Do you know those days when you do a ton of hard work and say something like: wow, I’m going to sleep good tonight. Try to have as many of those days as possible. I think sleep gets overlooked because of the perceived advantage of sleeping less to provide yourself with more productivity time. Also sleep is such an elementary thing all of us do literally from the time we’re born to the time we die. It’s tempting to think of sleep as a simple thing we will always have and so we take it for granted.
Another big dimension of your emotional fitness involves your closest relationships. Are your closest relationships stable and life-giving? If not then it’s going to be very difficult to maintain emotional fitness. The toxicity is going to continue chipping away at your soul until it becomes overwhelming. If you can’t solve the problems in your closest relationships then you should limit your exposure or sever the relationships entirely. Obviously such a thing as repairing a relationship is very dependent on the nuance and details of each case. But if you’ve done all that you can do and the relationship is still toxic you need to remove yourself. Living in constant stress causes you to age and results in your inability to respond properly in the other areas of your life.
And that brings us into our final pillar of fitness which is like a conglomeration of all the rest. This is social fitness. Social fitness is how well you do within the context of your community. Human beings thrive in community and are not designed for a solitary life. Sometimes in developed countries we can deceive ourselves into thinking a solitary life works but this is only because our communities have the infrastructure to support it. For example, you don’t need to team up with the men of your village to hunt deer because if you want meat all you need to do is go pick some up at the store. But it wasn’t always like this and there are many parts of your life in which you still need this community. One of the most basic examples is how you use the feedback of those around you to determine your grasp on sanity. If I say something incredibly stupid I’ll be able to see this stupidity register on the expressions of those around me. But if I didn’t have anyone around me it would be more difficult for me to perceive my mistake.
When it comes to social fitness two of the most important things to remember are humility and reciprocity. Let’s talk about humility first. People are repulsed by arrogance and they react very negatively to it. This reaction is so deep that for many people it happens automatically. It’s been baked into our DNA by generations of time. It actually doesn’t matter how good you really are at something – if you’re also arrogant then your community will reject you. Often we think of arrogance as pretending to be better than we are. But it’s also the case that you could genuinely be an all-star and still come off as arrogant – and the negative effects will be no different than if you were a pretender. Human reactions to arrogance are so powerful that you could spend your entire life refining a skill to become the best and then ruin all of that hard work through a simple lack of self-awareness. It’s very dangerous stuff.
The antidote to arrogance is to think of yourself less often. Many people think humility means self-deprecation but it actually means less focus on the self in general. Humble people are more interested in others than they are in themselves. The people in your life will love you and lift you up if you prioritize them and listen to them as if you’re interested in what they have to offer. Even if you’re not interested you should pretend to be interested until you can develop this character trait. The best place to be in terms of social humility is to do everything you can to be the most excellent version of yourself that you can be, while simultaneously expressing a strong, consistent interest in the lives of those around you. If you can manage that balance you will see others begin to love you well.
The second most important aspect of social fitness is reciprocity. Reciprocity is tightly associated with the idea of being interested in other people. Reciprocity means adding value into the lives of others who are respectful of you and who add value into your own life. This is not the same thing as being a door mat or a pushover. A pushover will continually sacrifice him or herself for someone who lacks respect for them. Reciprocity is about recognizing the people in your life who are important to you and being intentional about self-sacrifice for them.
Reciprocity is one of the most important elements of leadership. If you’re in a leadership position, the fastest way to undermine yourself and lose your authority is to fail in this area of reciprocity. No one wants to work for a leader who does nothing but bark orders and disrespect his people. This kind of leader will have to depend on fear and intimidation to keep his followers around. Leading from intimidation is ineffective at best and unstable at worst. The moment the followers are no longer afraid they will actively sabotage the leader’s position. This usually happens the instant the leader walks out of the room in the form of backbiting or gossip.
It’s far better to lead from a position of reciprocity because then your followers will love you. Workers are willing to go a lot further for a leader they love instead of a leader they fear. The same is true for all of your relationships. If a person is willing to extend deep trust to you then you need to be reciprocal and extend them trust as well. Pay attention for when those around you do good things and be sure to acknowledge them for it and give them credit. Never forget to tell others how much it means to you when they do these things and when they add value into your life.
Take the time to sit down and listen to those who are important to you and always guard yourself against feeling rushed. A good way to protect yourself against impatience or the sensation of feeling rushed is to remind yourself that no matter where you are, in that moment you are precisely where God has intended to you to be. Everyone loves a humble person who pays attention to the well-being of others and who listens intently. That’s why humility and reciprocity are the most important elements of social fitness. If you want to be successful in life you need to develop these four pillars of fitness: physical, intellectual, emotional, and social. These are without doubt the critical infrastructure which make up who you are as person. Your development or lack of development in these areas is going to factor heavily into the trajectory of your quality of life. The good news is everyone can work on these and continue to get better. It takes time, effort, and patience but you can do it – you must do it. When you feel tired or weak in one area of fitness take a small rest and switch to the development of one of the others. You’ll find that these pillars carry synergy quite nicely. Synergy means getting better at one will help you get good at the others. You have the freedom to get out there and get started today. Get after it.
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