Everet Martins's Blog, page 4
August 6, 2016
Things I’ve Learned From My Dog
Expect the best from people and give them a warm greeting. Do I always do this — hell no. But I like the idea. Charlotte will run up to most people at the dog park and try to give them a kiss, albeit without them expecting it. It’s the thought that counts, right?
Charlotte willingly will give most things a shot at least once. Jumping over rocks, slithering into narrow spaces, to jumping the backyard fence. The time she jumped the fence I found her terrified, trying to jump back over but failing. She made it over in the first place by standing on a pile of leaves and dirt I use for compost. She never tried to jump the fence again. Give new things a shot, even if they scare you.
Charlotte doesn’t speak when she wants to be touched. She simply nudges her snout against you or under your arm until you start rubbing and scratching her. She loves attention and loves to be petted. Being touched makes you feel good. It’s easy to forget how important this is to life when you spent most of your day lost in the hustle and bustle of the day.
When she wants something or doesn’t like something she plainly lets you know without beating around the bush. When she wants to go outside she’ll whine at the door. Wants to eat, she’ll sit near her food bowls. If she wants to sleep and we’re watching a movie, she’ll go into the bedroom where it’s dark. There generally is no murkiness to what she needs to be happy.
Charlotte simply wants to be with you. She doesn’t care where we’re going, what we’re doing as long as we’re doing it together. I think what makes her most disappointed is when (we) the humans leave the house without her.
She needs to workout to remain sane. If she doesn’t get her walks she won’t sleep and will spend the night gnawing and licking herself. She is an organism whose body needs to be used for more than just sitting and sleeping. She always stretches before she moves, when she wakes up, and when starting any sort of physical activity. I find her frequent stretching quite remarkable.
Dogs let go. If you accidentally step on her paw, bump her too hard, accidentally pinch her long tail on something she’ll let you know with a yelp. A few seconds later it’s as if it never happened. She instantly forgives and does not hold grudges. Grudges, bad moods are simply a waste of your energy and a waste of your short life.
Persistence pays off. When I’m trying to teach my dog a new trick, most recently balancing a treat on her snout, she doesn’t know what I expect of her. Each time she gets it right I praise her and give her a treat. Do that twenty, fifty times later she knows what I’m looking for and can do it almost flawlessly, though sometimes confuses commands.
Readers: Have a dog? Any pet? Post your pet’s photo in the comments! 
July 30, 2016
Book Review: Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us
I just finished the book Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us. I read a lot in the health and fitness genre and in that area there is a lot of shit. This book rises to the top and is well worth your time, even if you’re not overly interested in that area.
It’s about how processed foods are rigorously engineered to take you to the bliss point, the point at which they are perfectly palatable. And big surprise, this is done with a combination of varying amounts of salt, sugar and fat. It’s also about a lot more than that.
The advent of society’s historically recent harried lifestyles have left a gap open which the big food companies have capitalized upon. The book mentions how women joining the workforce and being generally the operators of the household have spurned the creation of a lot of the convenience foods we see lining our store shelves today. There is a price to convenience.
The price is the death of family meals. It encourages eating anytime, anywhere, in any place. The tradition of eating real food with people you love is slowly dying.
I learned that we don’t have a bliss point for fat. We simply want more and more of it. I agree with this wholeheartedly as I add almost pure fat to my morning coffee on the weekends (butter and coconut oil – bulletproof coffee) and find it quite delicious. Now it’s in everything and offers little in the way of nutritional value in its mass-processed form.
Cheese wasn’t as ubiquitous as it is today. Cheese is on everything as either an accent taste, flavoring, or simply loaded on convenience food adding needless calories. Cheese was formerly mainly consumed as an appetizer or an accompaniment to wine.
Here’s the crazy thing about why we increased our cheese consumption. The Reagan administration subsidized dairy farmers and had no choice but to buy their excess inventory after making the agreement. They needed a way to get rid of it all. The government marketed cheese with your tax dollars. We have literally paid with our own tax dollars to in a way make ourselves fatter.
Salads come with cheese. It’s added to kid’s lunchables pseudo-foods.
Their marketing preys on children who are most vulnerable to their influence. What you learn when you’re young becomes harder to break as you get older E.g. Many people have a tradition like: My family always has English Muffins for breakfast, which might as well be sugar. The book goes deep on cereals and how most cereals are heavily sugar laden, some reaching as high as 60-70% of their content being sugar.
The food companies hire masters of manipulation who employ every psychological technique available. The most insidious thing about it is that in the marketing messages they make sure that the parent feels comfortable giving the child a bucket of sugar, by saying something on the label to the effect of “contains real fruit juice” when that only comprises 5% of the product and the rest is just High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS), water, and dubious food coloring. If you were to create these products from scratch at home you would realize they’re fit for nothing more than the drain.
There are a lot of other fucked up things in the book that have stuck with me:
Customers are referred to as users, like drug users
Far more money is spent on advertising sugar filled products than what it costs to create them by leaps and bounds
When it was discovered that children wanted cake for breakfast, Kellog created Poptarts to meet that need so parents could feed their children that shit.
The big gulp (64 oz) of soda contains over 40 teaspoons of sugar
The book is very comprehensive and much more is covered. The author visited executives in hundreds of interviews, visited factories, spoke with lobbyists and did a great job as far as I can tell.
Another point that struck a cord with me is how the executives of these companies do not eat the food they produce. They know how bad it is and won’t touch it. In their meetings at the corporate offices it’s not served. There are quite a few people in the book who were trying to make up for damage they levied to society by working with the author to disclosed the food industry’s vile practices.
The book doesn’t end with advice you can implement. It just sort of fizzles out like: “So this is all bad..and THE END.” Despite all of that, I’d still highly recommend it for getting deep dive on what these companies are trying to sell us.
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July 23, 2016
Lessons from Our Oriental Heritage by Will Durant
I’m currently reading Our Oriental Heritage by Will Durant and absolutely loving it. This book is a goldmine of knowledge and wisdom. Here are a few of the gems I’ve taken from this book and found them incredibly powerful insights.
Lessons from Our Oriental Heritage by Will Durant
“If the average man had had his way there would probably never have been any state. Even today he resents it, classes death with taxes, and yearns for that government which governs least. If he asks for many laws it is only because he is sure that his neighbor needs them; privately he is an unphilosophical anarchist, and thinks laws in his own case superfluous.”
“Shame is a child of custom rather than of nature.”
“No language has ever had a word for a virgin man.”
Because men are sex machines and women were property.
“There is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the present. Underneath all civilization, ancient or modern, moved and still moves a sea of magic, superstition and sorcery. Perhaps they will remain when the works of our reason have passed away.”
“Civilizations are the generations of the racial soul. As family-rearing, and then writing, bound the generations together, handing down the lore of the dying to the young, so print and commerce and a thousand ways of communication may bind the civilizations together, and preserve for future cultures all that is of value for them in our own. Let us, before we die, gather up our heritage, and offer it to our children.”
“The worst conceivable government would be by philosophers; they botch every natural process with theory; their ability to make speeches and multiply ideas is precisely the sign of their incapacity for action.”
“There are not many things finer in our murderous species than this noble curiosity, this restless and reckless passion to understand.”
This is an awesome library of books to add to your collection. Find it here:
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July 17, 2016
Survey: Please Tell Me Which Cover Sketch You Like Best
I’m getting my book covers redesigned starting with Stormcaller and I wanted to get your feedback on the initial sketches I received from the artist. Please let me know by filling out the survey question below which cover sketch you like best. Thank you!
Create your own user feedback survey
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July 10, 2016
How To Not Be Lazy
It can often feel like a sin when you’re doing the things you really enjoy doing. For me I typically most feel this way when playing video games, though I do get a lot of enjoyment (and writing ideas!) from them. It’s easy to think you’re not doing enough, but before you think that I’d suggest taking a hard, quantifiable look at how you use your time before you deem yourself as lazy.
One of my favorite ways to track how I use my time on the computer is RescueTime. Every week it sends me a chart to my inbox showing me how well I used my time.
You may feel like you’re lazy because you’re not getting things done that are most important to you. The way you do that is by doing the most important things first everyday. It sounds so simple, but it’s incredibly powerful and took me a long time to get my head around. You lose energy and willpower as the day progresses and your most important activities are shunted to the backseat if you don’t attack them early.
You may have a self-discipline problem. There are ways of increasing your self-discipline via training your willpower. It is a common belief that willpower is fixed, but it has been shown that it can be trained and improved like any other muscle. Check out the The Willpower Instinct for a deeper analysis on the subject. The way you grow your willpower is overcoming it with brute mental force. Don’t want to workout? Do it anyway. Want to eat that luscious donut sitting by the coffee station? Deny yourself the pleasure of having it. That’s the long and short of how to improve your willpower.
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The other reason you may feel lazy is that you’re comparing yourself to hyper achievers. This is often my problem. I look at someone like Gary Vaynerchuk or Elon Musk and feel like a lazy bastard. These guys work 18-20 hours a day. With more time you can get more done, but I remind myself there is a biological cost to operating like this. Eventually biology catches up with you via disease.
I believe that a lack of direction, motivation and an empty schedule can make you feel lazy. If the vast majority of your time is spent on sleep and leisure activities, motivation or the lack of what you consider a worthy pursuit could be your problem. Find a hobby, try something new, broaden your horizons outside of your regular job. I personally find life far more satisfying while trying to hone the edge of multiple subjects simultaneously. Outside of regular full time job I have been focusing on writing novels, option trading, reading, and Brazilian jiu-jitsu. I know reading looks odd on there, but I do approach it like a job and read at least 30 minutes a day every day.
Be careful who you associate with at work. Most people don’t love their work and that’s fine. Avoid people at the office who spend the day complaining and spreading negativity. That shit is infectious. Even if the work you do is in itself not implicitly fulfilling, learn to like the process for its own sake is a skill that is tough to develop.
Change your habits. If the first thing you do when you get home from work is drop your bags and fire up Netflix, you’re setting yourself up for failure from the beginning. Also if you check email or facebook/twitter/instagram as your first item everyday your wasting your best energy on shit that doesn’t matter.
Social media does not matter. Email can wait. Do something productive first, then “reward” yourself with the dopamine hit of checking facebook and email.
You need to know what you’re going to do with your time. You must have a plan for what you will do with your time. As good ole Ben Franklin says:
“If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail!”
Have a rough idea of what you want to accomplish for that day outside of work. I recommend no more than 2-3 items. E.g. Exercise, tweak facebook ads, watch video on book marketing. The cool thing is that once you’ve completed those “big” items you wanted to get done that day, the rest of the day is gravy. You’ll also feel good about your day when you lay down to rest, knowing you’re moving forward toward your big goals. The other cool thing I’ve found from having a plan as simple is this is that you’ll fly through those few items because you know exactly what you need to do. From anecdotal experience, I see a lot of people floundering around without a clear direction of what they need to get done.
You need specific tasks. For example, let’s say one day you think “The bathroom is gross, it should be cleaned.” Change that to: “Tomorrow after I get home from work I will scrub the toilet, bathroom mirror, and bleach the tub.” Then write it down for your plan the following day and follow the plan.
I believe that lethargy and lack of productivity are simply bad habits that have been carved in your daily routine over time. Habits can change and you just need to create new ones, then it requires very little effort to continue.
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July 4, 2016
What Really Matters at the End of Life
Today’s post is short, but the video is long (19m) and well worth the watch. I spent most of the long 4th of July weekend with my girlfriend and family roasting on a lakeside beach of New Hampshire. We ate lots of ice cream, laughed, drank, read, flew a kite, played games, swam, and slept a lot. I have a good sunburn and sand stuck between my toes to prove it. I squeezed in a little writing today on Ascending Shadows – Book 6 of the Age of Dawn.
I leave you with this video for some food for thought:
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June 25, 2016
Ascending Shadows: Sneak Preview
Here are the first 1110 words of the *very rough* draft of the Prologue from Ascending Shadows – Book 6 of The Age of Dawn.
WARNING: This is completely unedited and is likely rife with typos and grammatical errors.
Enjoy!
June 18, 2016
Why You Should Meditate
I’ve made a consistent habit of meditating almost everyday for the past year and have found it to be awesome for a variety of reasons. I hope to be able to convince you to give it an honest shot and why you should meditate. It will feel weird and different at first, but you’ll get used to it. If you do meditate, I’d love to hear how it benefits you.
1 — You’ll get in touch with your body in ways most people never do. Once you allow yourself to stop focusing on a specific task and on shit that needs to be done, you’ll develop a new sense of bodily awareness. You’ll notice small pains you never knew were there. You’ll notice how the air smells, the temperature of the room. You’ll notice all of those things your brain typically shuts off so you can function and do what needs to be done. You’ll get a good sense of how truly hungry you are. It will help you to better evaluate if you’re eating solely for pleasure or for genuine hunger. Learn more about body scanning meditation.
2 — You’ll learn how to better focus your mind. It sounds counterintuitive, but by learning to let your thoughts go when you do need to focus on something you’ll find that you have a greater capacity for mental endurance. I’ve found I’m able to spend longer periods of time listening to audiobooks or reading history, and other subjects that require a good deal of focus.
3 — You will feel less stress. Stress is one of the biggest killers of neurons according to the book
Why Isn’t My Brain Working?: A Revolutionary Understanding of Brain Decline and Effective Strategies to Recover Your Brain’s Health (highly recommend!) When you meditate you’re just sitting there, not moving, letting your thoughts fade in an out of your mind like the waxing and waning of the ocean’s waves against the shore. Eventually you’ll end your meditation session and feel like a burden of stress that had been weighing and building on your back for the most of the day was lifted. It’s a fantastic feeling unlike no other.
4 — You’ll be present. You’ll notice things you never noticed before. You’ll hear the birds twittering, the breeze making the leaves flutter, the dog barking on the next block. We spend so much of our lives buried in minutia that we miss the world around us. It gives you a moment to just be the human animal that you are. Sometimes I feel so incredibly good during my meditation sessions I find myself laughing out the blue.
5 — You’ll discover that happiness comes from within. Sometimes you’ll feel so good from meditation that you’ll realize you don’t need anything else and nothing else matters. Its so good that it seems to me that it may be a slippery slope for some people. Someone might think something like “hey, why get a job? why go to work? why do anything when I can just feel good and meditate?” It can be a powerful drug. Sometimes I meditate when I travel and I realize the meditation was the best part of the trip. Kind of funny, maybe a little sad, but true.
How I meditate. There are thousands of ways that people can meditate. Here’s how I do it. I go to a quiet place where I will be undisturbed and put a timer on my phone for ten minutes. I sit in a cross-legged position and use the box breathing technique I learned from Mark Divine (video below). I let whatever thoughts come into my mind in, observe them, and let them go. Try not to grip tightly onto whatever random thoughts bubble up into your mind. Don’t dive into them. Just observe them from the surface and let them fade away. I do this with whatever thoughts enter my mind. I think of my mind as a beach and each thought is wave. The thoughts come in, crash, then melt away in the sands of time. Sometimes I do eyes open, typically I do eyes closed. Interestingly I sometimes have mild hallucinations with my eyes open such as seeing twisting colors or swimming shapes.
Box breathing how-to video:
Readers: Please let me know your thoughts in comments!
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June 12, 2016
Cover Reveal: Ascending Shadows – Book 6 of The Age of Dawn
I’m very excited and pleased to show you my new book’s cover and title. The manuscript is still a work in progress, but the cover art and title are done. Here’s the progression. Enjoy!
A good first start for Senka and Isa
Things are starting to come along here…
Getting there…just needs some finishing touches
Final version without text
Ascending Shadows – Book 6 of The Age of Dawn
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June 5, 2016
Epic Writing Music
Here are my favorite albums I like to listen to while writing. But they’re awesome listening for anywhere. About to play some D&D? Magic the Gathering? Here are your soundtracks. Make your wait at the bus stop an epic experience. Pop in your earbuds while pulling weeds to turn it into an monumental war of man vs. nature. Make your walk to work or school an experience to be remembered for all the ages to come. OK, I’m done, but seriously if you’ve never listened to music like this, give it a shot. You might be surprised how much you like it.
These are less epic, more industrial and a bit on the darker side. All very harrowing experiences if you let yourself fall into the music.
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