Note: The following is an excerpt from The Technique of Getting Things Done (1947) by Donald Laird. 

The right reading — often accidental — wakes up slumberers and gives needed goals to those who still have none. The right book or article has started many on the main road and off the detours. 

Enrich Weiss wanted to act in a circus, so this nine-year-old practiced in a shed behind his home in Appleton, Wisconsin until he could hang by his knees from a trapeze and pick needles from the floor with his eyelids. At twelve he ran away from home. 

In a secondhand book store, when he was sixteen, he picked up a book on magic by Robert Houdin that was to change his life. He paid a dime for the book, started to read it after supper. He could not leave it. He thought about magic tricks while cutting neckties, while running in amateur races. He got more secondhand books on magic, worked up a few tricks of his own, and changed his name to Houdini. 

He was a lifelong habitué of secondhand book stores, gathered more than 5,000 volumes on magic and spiritualism which are now in the Library of Congress.

In Abilene, Kansas, a tallish high-school boy from across the tracks wondered what to do when he graduated. He was tired of working in the creamery. He visited the weekly-newspaper office; famed editor J. W. Howe loaned him a book that had just come in. The book told the story of that amazing military leader, Hannibal. Young Dwight Eisenhower was fascinated. It was the turning point in his life. Reading the right book started “Ike” Eisenhower on the way to West Point Military Academy to become Allied Supreme Commander in history’s greatest war. 

Robert E. Peary, a dreamy boy from Cresson, Pennsylvania, was inspired by Elisha Kane’s book Arctic Explorations (a dreary tome, if you ask me). Robert’s dreamy eyes narrowed; he could already see visions of the frozen Northlands. “I will help the world understand the mysteries of those places,” he decided. 

That book gave him a goal. At thirty he made his first voyage of exploration to Greenland. At forty-seven he tried to reach the North Pole and failed. But he still had his goal, born of boyhood reading. 

Heroically, he tried again and six years later did reach the Pole, the first person to capture this goal which men had been trying to reach for four hundred years. Scientific societies and governments the world over honored the boy who had gotten his start from reading, reading that gave him a wrought-iron determination.

Keep a supply of worthwhile books around where children can see them. Select books that cover a variety of subjects. Expose young people to the stimulation of reading. There is no telling where it may lead.

John Masefield ran away to sea at fourteen, was assistant bartender in New York for a while. At eighteen he read Chaucer’s The Parliament of Fowls. That decided him; he would be a poet. And in fifteen years his poetry had won everlasting fame. He became Poet Laureate. 

A librarian, your boss, a book dealer, a teacher can help you pick the reading that will count.

Often we just stumble across the right reading; that’s why it is wise to read many things. I accidentally stumbled into psychology. I was halfway through college, majoring in chemistry, and an assistant in the physics laboratory. Then one Christmas vacation I started to read a four-volume manual on experimental psychology by E. B. Titchener. At the end of the vacation I knew I was changing my vocation. My chemistry professor was disgusted. But the halfhearted chemistry student became an enthusiastic psychology student. 

Great Lives Remind Us 

Do you have a hero? “Tell me whom you admire,” said Sainte-Beuve, “and I will tell you what you are.” 

The lives of great men have aroused sleeping abilities in thousands of people who were once stumbling along. Reading such lives has given many an irresistible determination to get more things done.

Rudyard Kipling went to Bombay at seventeen wearing real whiskers. In the heat and sickness he toiled on a newspaper, apparently his lifework. Alone in the house one hot evening he picked up a book by Walter Besant, All in a Garden Fair. The book told the story of a young man who wanted to write and who did in spite of great obstacles. 

That selfsame evening Kipling resolved that he, too, would write, whatever the obstacles. He started at last to save money. At twenty-four he returned to England with his savings, settled in a room over a sausage shop, and began the writing that was to make his name world-famous.

F. B. Morse was one of eleven children. He was ten when he read Plutarch’s famous Lives of Illustrious Men [another title for Parallel Lives], those stories of ancient Greek leaders and noble Romans. The book fired the young man; he, too, was going to accomplish something. Within a quarter-century he won recognition as a portrait painter, and a short time later invented the telegraph. 

Plutarch’s Lives started him on the road to the American Hall of Fame. 

Plutarch’s work has given many young men the stimulus to get things done. Napoleon carried a copy of it for twenty years. Oliver Hazard Perry, hero of the War of 1812, read and re-read Plutarch, starting in his youth. So did Robert Brookings, who established the famous Brookings Institute in Washington. 

Benjamin Franklin attributed his zeal for getting things done to reading Essays to Do Good, by Cotton Mather. He was about sixteen, working in his brother’s print shop, when he seriously began to read to improve himself. He says in his autobiography: 

I then proposed to my brother that if he would give me, weekly, half the money he paid for my board, I would board myself. He instantly agreed to it, and I presently found that I could save half what he paid me. This was an additional fund for buying books. 

But I had another advantage in it. My brother and the rest going from the printing-house to their meals, I remained there alone, and, dispatching presently my light repast, had the rest of the time till their return for study.

Loyola was thirty and a common Spanish soldier when he was laid low with a leg wound. While convalescing he read The Lives of the Saints, which inspired him to become a religious worker. He founded the Jesuit order, was consecrated a saint by Pope Gregory XV. 

“Study a great man,” said Louis Pasteur. 

Great men who have done things, who are still doing things, can become our inspiring lifetime friends through their biographies and autobiographies. Get a hero — and get better acquainted with him by reading about him. 

Some rich man who wanted to make the world hum could put more books about people who have done things within reach of the minds of the generation which is yet to do things. 

Everyone can find new friends who count by reading books about people who count. Try reading a biography a month for several months.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Life rarely unfolds according to plan. A relationship implodes. A move or job change doesn’t work out. Or you simply fail in a goal you’ve set for yourself.

My guest has spent almost two decades researching and field-testing how to get back on track when smaller slip-ups and larger upheavals knock you off course. His name is Steve Kamb, and he’s the founder of Nerd Fitness and the author of How to Try Again: An Approachable Guide to Navigating Chaos and Making Change THAT STICKS. Today on the show, Steve shares practical principles for dealing with life’s frustrating and demoralizing setbacks. We discuss why sometimes the best move is to pause rather than push harder, how to accept reality without resigning yourself to it, why treating change as an experiment can help you beat paralysis and take action, why you should treat consistency with your goals the way you do showering, and more.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Steve’s previous appearances on the AoM podcast:
  • Episode #42: Level Up Your Life With Nerd Fitness & Steve Kamb
  • Episode #170: Level Up Your Life
• Steve’s AoM guest posts:
  • Don’t Be That Guy: The Taxonomy of Lousy Male Friends
  • How Superheroes, Movies, and Video Games Taught Me to Conquer Fear
• Nerd Fitness
• Museum of Failure
• Sunday Firesides: Good Times Are Not Around the Corner (And That’s Great News!)
• Sunday Firesides: Treat Life Like an Experiment
• “Lightning Fields” by the Killers

Connect With Steve Kamb

• Steve’s website
• Steve on IG
• Steve on LinkedIn
• Steve on Substack

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Transcript Coming Soon

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

So when I had Beau L’Amour — son of the great Western novelist Louis L’Amour — on the podcast a couple of years ago to talk about his dad’s life and habits, my ears perked up when he mentioned that his father worked out every single day for an hour or two in the afternoon, right into old age.

The conversation moved on, so I didn’t circle back to ask exactly what L’Amour did for his workouts, but that question has been rattling around in my head ever since.

So I recently decided to email Beau to see if he remembered what his dad’s daily workout looked like.

To my pleasant surprise, Beau wrote back immediately with something even better than I had expected. Instead of sending me a general description of Louis’ workouts, he sent me scans of his dad’s typed weekly to-do lists with completed items struck through in red pencil. On these weekly agendas, Louis included his workouts for the week.

The ones he sent span from 1968 to 1983, and they cover a lot more than exercise. A single week might include blocking out the first chapter of a novel, answering all his mail, reviewing his Chinese and French, reading to his kids by the fire, and teaching them how to fall and box correctly. It was inspiring to see that the young autodidact in Education of a Wandering Man continued his self-education even into his 80s and intentionally scheduled it with the same rigor he scheduled his workouts. But it’s L’Amour’s training I want to dig into here in this article.

Why Louis L’Amour Trained

Beau gave me the backstory of his father’s exercise habit. Louis was born in 1908, trained as a boxer, and worked physical labor jobs throughout the 1920s. He boxed and trained for the sport, focusing primarily on speed and endurance. By the early ’30s, he was trying to make it as a writer while training young boxers, which kept him in shape.

Then came WWII. His job in the Transportation Corps had him leading convoys of double gasoline tankers through burning towns in Europe, but the food was plentiful, and the trips into nearby cities were frequent, and he came out of it carrying extra weight.

Louis continued to exercise after the war, but he got really serious about it in 1966, when he was 58 years old. Like other writers, he spent a lot of the day sitting, and this exacerbated a niggling back pain he’d had since the war. The pain was getting in the way of his work. It got so bad that he went to a doctor for advice.

In a letter written in 1976, L’Amour recalled what he did next:

When my doctor told me I should not lift anything heavy, not even my own child, that was more than ten years ago. It was only then that I started lifting weights. I never had before, beyond what I had done in working around the country…I started lifting weights carefully, with very light weights, as I’d had a bad back since riding in jeeps during WWII. Now I can lift five to six thousand pounds in a couple of hours, and after my work-outs I feel great…since I began lifting weights I’ve had no more back trouble. I’d simply been sitting too much, and my muscles had softened, and there are some bones that need the strong muscles around them. I’ve never had to go back to that doctor because my back trouble ended with proper exercise.

L’Amour’s doctor told him to lift nothing. Louis responded by lifting thousands of pounds a session and curing the very problem the doctor was worried about. I love that. Sounds like a young Teddy Roosevelt, who, when his doctor told him not to overexert himself, decided to do the opposite and “make his body.”

There was another reason Louis started lifting when he was nearing 60. In 1974, he wrote in his journal:

I’ve not yet done a book that really pleases my taste…One reason I exercise, too. I am just learning to write, just gaining command of my medium, and must work for a long, long while.

Louis kept training because he wasn’t done creating his art yet, and he wanted a body that would hold up long enough to continue honing his craft and putting his work into the world. He trained for what Nietzsche called “Great Health.” Inspiring!

The Louis L’Amour Workout

Beau L’Amour training with his dad, Louie, back in the day. From the Louis L’Amour Facebook Page.

Alright, so what did ol’ Louis do for his fitness routine?

Remember, the man on these sheets is in his sixties and seventies, and the routine stays remarkably consistent across fifteen years of lists. It breaks down into three parts: conditioning, the iron, and discipline at the table.

Conditioning (the Boxer’s Base)

• Jump rope
• Stationary bike
• Heavy bag work 
• Walking
• Boxing rounds with his son, Beau
• Abs and sidebends

The Lifts (BB & DB — Barbell and Dumbbell)

L’Amour performed a circuit 6X a week that worked both his upper and lower body and included these exercises:

• Bench press
• Overhead press
• Flies
• Curls
• Rows
• Triceps
• Grip work
• Shrugs
• Lat pulldowns

Discipline at the Table

• Standing goal to stay under 220 lbs — sometimes he’d try to get down to 210
• Snacking was skipped when he was cutting weight; “No between meals,” as one sheet bluntly puts it

There’s nothing fancy here. L’Amour skipped rope, hit the bag, ran through his lifts, and ate sensibly. He aimed to do a variety of exercises, treated his workouts like a standing appointment, and got in one to two hours of physical activity every afternoon. 

I lift for plenty of reasons, but as a guy moving through middle age, L’Amour’s reason for lifting is the one that increasingly resonates. I want to stay strong enough to keep doing the work I haven’t finished yet.

Thanks to Beau for sharing these snapshots of his dad’s life. He’s got a new novel out — Skyring Water — that he collaborated with his father on, both before and after Louis’ passing.

For more inside details on Louis L’Amour’s life and work, listen to our podcast with Beau:

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Summertime is here, and we couldn’t be happier. As author Benjamin Alire Sáenz put it, summertime is a “book of hope,” filled with the promise of freedom, adventure, and dreamy idleness. It’s a time for sloughing off the heaviness of winter and soaking in the hot, rejuvenating sun.

It’s also a time for diving into certain pastimes and rituals. Seasonal traditions provide a natural rhythm and change to life that’s often missing in our modern world of fluorescent-lit, temperature-controlled sameness.

Below we offer 18 suggestions on things to do to make the most out of the season of summer and inject more of its mirth and charm back into your life. Do them all by Labor Day and you’ll have created enough hazy memories to keep you warm the next winter through.

Enjoy!

Here’s how to keep score with pen and paper.

Learn how to wear one with style.

Check out our video tutorials on summer grilling!

Need an idea on what to read? Check out our book lists!

Learn how to make your own rope swing with our illustrated guide!

Here’s why they’re still worth sending.

With our archives now 4,000+ articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in June 2014.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Quaker Oatmeal Squares: Brown Sugar. As I mentioned in last week’s article on what I eat in a day, my mid-morning meal is usually a big bowl of Fage yogurt and blueberries with some Kashi or oatmeal mixed in. The store was out of Kashi the other day, so I grabbed a box of these on a lark. Never had them before. They’ve turned into a Bob Ross happy accident. Love ’em. The flavor is hard to place. Kinda taste like waffles. There’s a decent amount of fiber in these too, which my gut appreciates. I’m going to ride with the oatmeal squares as the grain in my yogurt bowls for a while.

The Life of a Salesman. I love reading features about how people work. I enjoy them even more when they’re about jobs that have all but vanished. This LIFE photo essay by Cornell Capa is one of those. Inspired by Death of a Salesman, which had come out the year before, Capa spent four weeks shadowing Robert Brooks, a real salesman who rode trains out of Long Island through Cincinnati, St. Louis, Chicago, and Detroit, peddling umbrellas. Brooks fronted his own expenses and only made money when he closed a sale, and that year buyers were pinching pennies. No wonder Willy Loman was such a sad sack; the life of a traveling salesman was tough. The loneliness of Brooks comes through in the photos. 

1994 Interview With Eugene Sledge. If you haven’t listened to my interview with Henry Sledge about his father Eugene’s brutal war memoir, With the Old Breed, I highly recommend you do. After reading the book and talking to Henry, I went down some Pacific WWII YouTube rabbit holes and found this 1994 interview with Eugene about his experience on Peleliu. It was cool to see the man himself talk about his experience. One thing that struck me was how concerned he’d been about not wanting to let down his fellow Marines. He had a deep sense of manly honor. 

Survival in the Executive Jungle by Chester Burger. I stumbled on this one while poking around old books on the Internet Archive (I enjoy reading old ephemera). Published in 1964, the book reads like Machiavelli from the Mad Men era. It covers things like how to handle your boss, your colleagues, and your own ambition. Plenty of the advice has aged out (the world of the gray flannel suit is gone), but a fair amount still holds up. My favorite was the chapter “Time Worshipers and Clock Watchers.” It’s a nice kick in the pants about putting first things first by separating the work that actually matters from the busywork you do to look busy. You can read the whole thing for free on the Internet Archive.

On our Dying Breed newsletter, we published 5 Underexamined Consequences of the Declining Birth Rate and Sunday Firesides: Dying of Embarrassment.

Quote of the Week

Facts that are not firmly faced have a habit of stabbing us in the back.

—Sir Harold Bowden

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Burgers are my favorite food. What’s not to like about them? They’re tasty, filling, and — if you load them up with toppings like tomato, lettuce, and onion — offer a fairly nutritious mix of protein, carbs, and veggies.

​What I also like about the humble hamburger is exploring its many regional variations. New Mexico’s green chili burger? Fantastico. Minnesota’s Juicy Lucy? Amazing. Utah’s pastrami burger? Brother, I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a pastrami hamburger today.

​But my absolute favorite regional burger hails from my own home state: the Oklahoma fried onion burger.

​Boy, I love this burger. Its beauty is its simplicity. It’s basically a smash burger with onions in it. Just two thin patties, with fried, caramelized onion, cheese, and a bun. Hot diggity burger, it’s tasty.

The History of the Oklahoma Fried Onion Burger

​There’s some debate about how the fried onion burger was born, but the general story is that it originated back in the 1920s, in a small town west of OKC on Route 66 called El Reno.

A father and son duo named Homer and Ross Davis had a place there called the Hamburger Inn. As beef was expensive, the Davises kept the price of their burgers down by reducing the meat portion of the patty and smashing thin-sliced onions into it. The result was a cheaper burger that still gave diners a meal that felt like it had some substance.

When the Great Depression hit, this cost-saving measure became even more appreciated, and what was dubbed the “Depression burger” really took off.

The name may have been a little unappetizing, but the concoction was decidedly tasty.

​While the original purpose of smashing onions into the burger was to stretch the meat out, the unintended consequence was that it added layers of deliciousness. When you smash those onions into a screaming-hot flattop grill, the edges caramelize and crisp, and the patty drinks up all that sweetness from the onion.

​The Oklahoma fried onion burger was a hit with patrons, and soon other places in El Reno started making them. Many of these establishments are still in business. Robert’s Grill has been flipping onion burgers in El Reno since 1926, Johnnie’s joined in the ’40s, and Sid’s Diner opened in 1989 and was featured on that spiky-haired culinary madman Guy Fieri’s show Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives.

Last summer, our family made a road trip to eat an onion burger at Sid’s (and see the town where Twisters was filmed). The burger was okay. Solid. I enjoyed it. I always enjoy a burger. But I wouldn’t make the 2-hour drive to El Reno from Tulsa to eat it again.

You can find other onion burger joints around Oklahoma. Tucker’s is one of them. This OKC-based chain has a location in Tulsa, and puts out a legitimately tasty onion burger. They’ve got this big ol’ boy of a burger called the “Mother Tucker,” which has three patties. It weighs over a pound, and it’s an experience, my friend.

Recently, though, instead of outsourcing my fried onion burger consumption to dining establishments, I decided to try making them at home.

Friday night had long been Burger Night in the McKay household, and I’d make your standard backyard grilled burgers on my pellet smoker. Always enjoyable.

​But a couple of months ago, I had the hankering for an onion burger, but didn’t want to eat out. So I slapped a griddle we had into the smoker and got it scorching hot. While the griddle heated up, I sliced some sweet onions really thin and created some balls of 80/20 ground beef. Once the griddle was hot, I got to work. As quick as you can say “Jack Robinson,” I had fried onion burgers plated for my family.

​Reader, the family’s review of them was unanimous: amazing. Better than our usual burgers. Better than famous Sid’s in El Reno. Still not as good as Tucker’s — game respects game — but a worthy at-home substitute.

​The Oklahoma fried onion burger has become the McKay household’s go-to burger.

​Today, I’m going to explain how you, too, can make them this Friday. Even if you’ve never visited the Panhandle State, you’ll probably never go back to another way of making homemade burgers again.

How to Make an Oklahoma Fried Onion Burger

What You Need

​A griddle or cast-iron skillet. To make these onion burgers, you need a flat-top surface that can get really, really hot in order to give those burgers a nice crispy brown crust and those onions that delicious caramelization. If you’ve got a Blackstone griddle like many American suburban men do these days, you’re locked and loaded to easily make grilled onion burgers. If you don’t have one, you can buy a cast-iron griddle for your grill. If you don’t have a grill, you can cook them up in a cast-iron skillet on your stove — but realize that it’s going to get really smoky in your house; these burgers are best cooked outside.

​Heavy-duty spatula. You’re going to be smashing your burgers flat, and to do so, you need a heavy-duty spatula — something thick, wide, and made with stainless steel. A nice metal spatula will also help you flip the burgers while retaining the delicious brown crust that will form underneath.

​Mandoline slicer. You’ll use this to slice your onions super thin. You need your onions as thin as possible so they cook quickly.

Ingredients

• 80/20 or 85/15 ground beef. 80/20 has the ideal meat/fat ratio for hamburgers. But grocery stores sometimes only have 85/15. We’ve done that before, and it still works.
• Two large sweet onions. You want sweet onions for your grilled onion burger. And get two large onions. We’re going to be generous with our onion portions.
• Oil
• Salt
• Sliced cheese. American cheese is classic — extra salty and melty.
• Buns. You can never go wrong with a plain ol’ white bun. But if you want to kick your onion burger up a notch, opt for a potato bun.

Directions

Get Your Griddle Hot

You want your griddle scorching hot so you can get that nice crust on your meat, and so that the onions cook quickly. Shoot for a temp between 375 and 400 degrees Fahrenheit.

Slice Onions — Thin!

Use your mandoline to slice your onions as thin as you can.

Make 3-Ounce Burger Balls

Each hamburger has two 3-ounce patties. Each assembled burger takes two patties, so if you’re serving 4 people, you’ll need eight 3-ounce balls.

Get All Your Supplies Locked and Loaded

Make sure you have all your supplies ready and at hand before you begin cooking; things will move quickly once the process begins.

Hit the Griddle With Some Oil

Place Burger Balls on the Griddle and Salt

Throw a Fistful of Onions on the Burger Balls​

Err on the side of more. You want lots of onions because the onions are going to shrivel and render while they cook.

Smash Down the Meat and Onion With Your Spatula

Press very firmly, until the burger is about as thin as it’ll go.

Let Burgers Cook for 90 Seconds to 2 Minutes

You’re going to get a nice browning of the meat that’s griddle side, while the onions render down into the meat from above. Once you see liquid form on top of the patties and the onions look like they’re starting caramelize, they’re ready to flip. Usually happens in about 90 seconds to 2 minutes.

Flip Burgers

Place a Slice of Cheese on Each of the Burgers Immediately After Flipping​

These are the makings of 4 burgers, which will take two patties each. Put cheese on all the patties.

Place Buns on Top of Cheese

Stack the buns on top of your burger, putting the bottoms on one patty and the tops on the other. Let the buns sit there while the other side of the burger cooks. This will steam the buns and make them nice and soft, as well as give them a savory flavor. Let the other side of the meat cook for about another minute or so.

Sandwich the Meat, Onions, and Cheese Between the Buns

Gather as many of the fried onions as you can and place them on the patties. Stack the top bun+patty+onions+cheese layer on top of the bottom bun+patty+onions+cheese layer, sandwiching all that gooey goodness between your two bun halves.

If you’re making burgers for a larger crowd, put the already cooked and assembled burgers in an oven set to warm, and get the next batch of burgers going on the griddle.​

​

You can eat these fried onion burgers as is, but if you’d like to garnish them in the Okie style, keep it simple. Mustard and pickles only.

Enjoy! Once you try these, all other burgers will pale in comparison.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

The frisbee is one of the simplest pieces of recreational equipment ever invented. With just a plastic disc, a little open space, and someone to throw it with, you can inject a boring afternoon with an ample dose of fun. Successfully throwing a frisbee, however, isn’t as obvious as it would seem. Most beginners try to muscle the disc through the air, only to watch it wobble, dive, or veer wildly off target.

A good throw depends less on power and more on smooth mechanics. With the correct grip, arm motion, and wrist snap — as outlined above — anyone can make a frisbee fly fast and true. Once you learn the basics, getting it to your target, even just across the yard, becomes surprisingly satisfying.

Illustration by Ted Slampyak

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Walking is one of the most powerful health tools we have. It improves cardiovascular fitness, boosts mood, sharpens cognition, and can even be a predictor of how well you’ll age. But all those benefits depend on something we rarely think about until it starts hurting: our feet.

For many of us, walking is so automatic that we never consider the mechanics that make it possible. Yet the way we move, the shoes we wear, and the strength of the muscles in our feet can have a profound impact on how comfortably and efficiently we walk. When something goes wrong at our physical foundation, the effects can ripple upward, leading to pain not just in the feet, but in the knees, hips, and back.

My guest today is Dr. Milica McDowell, a physical therapist and the co-author of the new book Walk. Today on the show, Milica explains why walking speed may be a hidden vital sign, what gives you your signature walking style, and how to spot and address injury-inducing inefficiencies in your gait. We then talk about feet: whether you should worry about pronation, how to rehab plantar fasciitis — and no, it’s not stretching — the best kind of shoes to wear, and much more.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Article: Solvitur Ambulando — It Is Solved By Walking
• AoM podcast episode with Manoush Zomorodi
• AoM Article: I Started Taking a Walk Every Morning. Here’s What Happened to My Health
• AoM Article: 20 Rules for Walking
• AoM podcast episode with Matt Fitzgerald
• Altra shoes
• Vivobarefoot
• Lems shoes (this is the pair Brett wears)
• Tyr weightlifting shoe
• Injinji toe socks
• Toe spacer
• Study on calf raise standards

Connect With Milica McDowell

• Milica’s website
• Milica on IG

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Transcript Coming Soon

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

You want to get more things done in life. So you become an early riser, buy a planner, and download a to-do list app. You maintain inbox zero by answering email the minute it lands in your inbox. You stay busy from the second your feet hit the floor until you rest your weary head on your pillow at night.

But somehow the pile of stuff you need to do keeps growing, and you’re not making any real progress on your projects and goals.

What’s going on?

Well, chances are you’ve got a bottleneck somewhere in your system.

About a decade ago, I read a weird book called The Goal by a physicist named Eliyahu Goldratt that explores this problem. It’s a weird book because it’s a business book written as a novel about a plant manager racing to save a failing factory before corporate shuts it down.

I hadn’t thought much about The Goal until it recently came up in my conversation with David Epstein about Inside the Box. The book argues that constraints are inevitable and can either serve you or hold you back, depending on how you manage them.

Epstein talks about The Goal because Goldratt’s main idea centers on an ill-managed constraint. Goldratt argues that any project or task in life is really just a system consisting of a chain of steps, and that chain can only move as fast as its slowest link. There’s always one step that’s slower than the others, causing work to pile up behind it. Goldratt called that step the bottleneck.

You can optimize every other part of the system, but unless you address the bottleneck, things won’t speed up and output won’t increase. The bottleneck sets the pace for everything else.

Goldratt illustrates this dynamic through the example of a Boy Scout hike.

Your Bottleneck in Life Is a Hiking Scout Named Herbie

Picture a Scout troop walking single file down a narrow trail. The goal is to get the whole troop to camp as fast as possible, together.

Problem is, the kids don’t all walk at the same speed. There’s one slow kid somewhere in the middle of the line (Goldratt calls him Herbie), and even if the kid up front double-times it, the line as a whole can only move as fast as Herbie. The kid in front, who’s hauling it, disappears down the trail while a big gap opens up in front of Herbie. Behind him, the rest of the troop bunches up and starts stepping on each other’s heels. The kid up front has to stop and wait multiple times on the hike so Herbie and the boys behind him can catch up. Speeding up the front of the line doesn’t help and just makes the problem worse.

The only way to get the troop to camp faster together is to deal with Herbie.

The boys redistribute items from Herbie’s pack to the other scouts, which allows Herbie to walk a little faster. But he’s still slower than the other boys, so they also move him to the front, organizing the entire line around him. The rest of the troop falls in behind Herbie, eliminating the gaps and bunching that plagued the hike. 

While having Herbie up front slows down the faster hikers, it keeps everyone synchronized, ensuring that the troop stays together and moves effectively as a single, steady unit.

Every system in your life runs like that hike. Your home improvement projects, your work schedule, your finances, and your fitness. Each one consists of a chain of steps, and the whole chain moves only as fast as its slowest link. Speed up any step that isn’t the slow one, and you don’t get anywhere. Instead, you just pile up a bigger mess. So instead of doing more, you need to go hunting for your Herbie and find a way to deal with it.

This is what Goldratt called “The Theory of Constraints” and you can sum it up this way:

1. Identify the bottleneck.
2. Improve it where possible.
3. Organize the rest of the system around it.
4. Stop wasting effort optimizing things that aren’t the constraint.

Now let’s take a look at how finding and addressing bottlenecks in different areas of your life can help you enhance your effectiveness.

Addressing Bottlenecks in Your Fitness

You bought a program from some shredded dude on Instagram. You’re doing the work, but not seeing any progress. What’s going on? Well, you’re sleeping five and a half hours a night. Your body does most of its repair and muscle-building while you’re unconscious to the world, so if you’re shorting yourself there, it won’t matter how dialed-in your program is. Sleep is your bottleneck. Fix the sleep, and your workouts will start paying off.

Here’s another example. You want to incorporate the shoulder press in your routine so you can develop those man antlers. But if your shoulders are too stiff to get a bar overhead in a straight line, no amount of pressing volume is going to fix your press. You can add sets for a year and stay stuck. Tight shoulders are your bottleneck. To overcome it, spend fifteen minutes before your workout doing mobility work to loosen those shoulders up.

Addressing Bottlenecks in Your Finances

You want to get ahead financially. So you spend all Saturday comparing index funds over a 0.03% difference in fees. You’ve optimized your portfolio, but you’re still not growing that net worth as fast as you’d like.

What’s the bottleneck?

Well, you’re carrying a credit card balance at 24% interest. That 24% is costing you more every month than any fund will ever make you. There’s no investment on the planet that reliably beats a guaranteed 24% return by paying off the balance completely. That credit card balance is your financial bottleneck. So before you optimize your portfolio, throw everything you’ve got at the constraint. Pay off the card. Then go find the next bottleneck, which for a lot of people is the fact that they’ve got no cash cushion at all, so the first surprise expense sends them right back to the card. You can fix that bottleneck by starting an emergency fund.

Addressing Bottlenecks in Your Home

You’re trying to manage your home like an Aristotelian householder, but you notice that there are some pile-ups occurring that are really mucking things up. Take the kitchen. By dinner, the sink is full and dishes are sprawled all over your counter. You don’t have any space to prepare the meal.

Where’s the Herbie, here?

Ah, the dishwasher is still loaded with clean dishes from yesterday that nobody put away, so there’s nowhere to put the dirty ones. The full dishwasher is the bottleneck. Set up a system so that your kids empty it first thing every morning. Now you’ve got a place to put the dirty dishes, and a clean working space to get dinner on the table.

Let’s take a look at the morning scramble to school and work. If everybody’s fed and dressed, but you’re standing at the door for ten minutes every single day because nobody can find their shoes, the shoes are the bottleneck. Establish a system so that shoes are kept in a certain place each night so they can always be found. Bottleneck solved.

Is there a home project you and the Mrs. want to do but keep putting off again and again? There’s probably a Herbie causing the recurrent postponement. Maybe you’re finally going to finish the basement. You’ve researched flooring options, picked paint colors, priced out furniture, and bookmarked a dozen YouTube tutorials. But before any of that can happen, an electrician needs to come move an outlet. Until that appointment gets made, the entire project is stuck. Scheduling that electrician is the bottleneck. Stop comparing paint swatches and make the call.

Releasing the Bottleneck

The trick to finding the Herbies in your life is to look for areas where things are backing up. Ask yourself, “What’s the one thing that, if fixed, would make everything else faster or easier?”

Once you spot a bottleneck, address it quickly, and you’ll start to see progress pick up.

Solving one bottleneck doesn’t end the job, though. Fix the slowest link, and whatever was second-slowest becomes your new bottleneck. That’s the final step in Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints: go find the next bottleneck and work on that one.

You’ll probably get a lot more done dealing with that one slow link than you ever did trying to speed up everything else.

To learn more about how you can use constraints to your advantage, listen to our podcast with David Epstein:  

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

When Ernest Hemingway was working on the manuscript of a book about his safari in Africa, he played with a passage (which he later deleted) that listed all the things he loved and loved to do. He began with seeing, hearing, eating, drinking, sleeping, and reading; looking at pictures, cities, oceans, fishes, and fighting; thinking and observing; being in boats and battles or on saddle horses with “guns between your legs.”

The list continued down the page:

To watch the snow, rain, grass, tents, winds, changes of season . . . To talk, to come back and see your children, one woman, another woman, various women, but only one woman really, some friends, speed, animals . . . courage, co-ordination, the migration of fishes, many rivers, fishing, forests, fields, all birds that fly, dogs, roads, all good writing, all good painting, the principles of revolution, the practice of revolution, the Christian theory of anarchy, the seasonal variation of the Gulf Stream, its monthly variation, the trade winds, counter currents, the Spanish bull ring, cafes, wines, the Prado, Pamplona, Navarra, Santiago de Compostella, Sheridan, Casper, Wyoming, Michigan, Florida, Arkansas, Montana.

Still not feeling he had encapsulated the things of life that filled his heart, he made another attempt:

To stay in places and to leave, to trust, to distrust, to no longer believe and believe again, to care about fishes, the different winds, the changes of the seasons, to see what happens, to be out in boats, to sit in the saddle, to watch the snow come, to watch it go, to hear rain on the tent, to know where I can find what I want.

In reference to the above, Hemingway’s biographer, Carlos Baker, comments: “What he really wanted was a total immersion in the sensuous experience of living. The lists were nothing more than verbal talismans to help him achieve such an end.”

Hemingway had a zeal for making the most of life, not only in his professional vocation, but in his leisure time as well. Papa always wanted to be where the action was, not just as a spectator but as a participant; he wanted to experience what the world had to offer firsthand, with all five senses. In this he certainly succeeded, becoming not only a war correspondent and writer of classic novels, but a hunter, fisherman, sailor, amateur boxer and bullfighter, and world traveler. Few others in modern history have seen, heard, smelled, tasted, and touched so much.

How’d he do it all?

As discussed previously, it was a strict daily writing routine that kept up his output of words.

What may be surprising to learn about Hemingway’s life, however, is that the same disciplined approach he took to his job, was what allowed him to have so much fun outside of it.

Hemingway’s Approach to the “Challenge of Enjoyment” 

I suppose the most remarkable thing about Ernest is that he has found time to do the things most men only dream about. He has had the courage, the initiative, the time, the enjoyment to travel, to digest it all, to write, to create it, in a sense. —A. E. Hotchner, Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir

Papa embraced what he called “the fiesta concept of life.” He was always seeking after excitement and adventure and looking to have a “hell of a good time.” Hemingway’s friend, A. E. Hotchner, “had never seen anyone with such an aura of fun and well-being. He radiated it and everyone [around him] responded.” He was always looking forward to what was around the corner, and began each day with high expectations for what it would bring. In fact, he typically stood on the balls of his feet, like a boxer, seemingly ever ready to move, to fight, to leap into action, to go.

To get at the fun he so relished, we popularly imagine Hemingway taking a loose, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants, party-on kind of approach to life.

But as Hotchner explains, Papa’s philosophy of leisure was actually the opposite of spontaneous:

Ernest’s confidence in the unending order of good times was founded on a very disciplined point of view toward the hours of his days and weeks. Each day was a challenge of enjoyment, and he would plan it out as a field general plans a campaign.

Hemingway felt that “good times should be orchestrated and not left to the uncertainties of chance,” Hotchner writes, and he “planned fun as seriously as work, for he considered them of equal importance to Well-Being.”

The gusto with which Hemingway attacked his “leisure” time not only created incredible adventures for himself, but for those who enjoyed the exhilaration of being pulled into his orbit. As one friend remembered, “He generated excitement because he was so intense about everything, about writing and boxing, about good food and drink. Everything we did took on a new importance when he was with us.”

The fact that Hemingway rigorously planned out his good times, Hotchner adds, “did not mean that there was no flexibility.” A visit to Paris that was supposed to be a two-day trip, could turn into a two-month stay. But it did mean that Hemingway, whether at home or on vacation, had a detailed idea of what he wanted to do each day — the places he wanted to visit, the people he wanted to see, the activities he wanted to partake of, the restaurants and bars in which he wanted to eat and drink. As Hotchner observes, each day “was set up carefully before it dawned or, at the very latest, at its dawning.”

Plan for Good Times

Hemingway wanted a life filled with excitement, drama, and real interest, and understood that those qualities wouldn’t just happen — they had to be intentionally planned for and created.

It’s a secret to good livin’ that commonly goes unrecognized. Even those who plan out their work days, don’t think of planning out their leisure time. Folks head into the weekend without any idea of what they’d like to do with it, and end up piddling around the house, surrendering to the inertia of television, and feeling restless come Monday that they let another 48 hours of potential fun slip away. Or they take trips without a real itinerary in mind, spend the days a little aimlessly, and return home feeling like they could have made more of their rare vacation time.

Plotting your “off hours” can help you make much more out of them.

It doesn’t mean scheduling out each hour of your evenings or weekends, nor carrying around a clipboard of activities on your vacation and continually checking your watch to keep yourself moving between them. It doesn’t rule out flexibility, changing plans, and taking unforeseen detours. It doesn’t even necessarily require planning too far ahead.

Rather, it’s as simple as having an idea for an activity you want to do and a new restaurant you want to try before the weekend starts. For example, at our weekly family meeting, the McKays try to pick one microadventure to do on Friday evening or Saturday. We’ve found that without this preset plan, we tend to fritter away the weekend without doing much of anything.

Planning your leisure time is also as simple as spending 20 minutes each night you’re on vacation looking at travel sites or books and deciding on a few activities you’d like to do the next day. That way in the morning, you’re ready to hit the ground running.

It’s also a matter of planning those trips, period. Turning those “We ought to do that someday” thoughts into reality.

It’s worth generating a list of all the things you love and love to do, just as Hemingway once did. Then think about how to get more of them in your life more frequently. Then create a plan to make it happen.

Don’t leave your good times to chance.  

As Hemingway said, “Never regretted anything I ever did. Only regret things I didn’t do.”

With our archives 4,000 articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in 2018.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.