Mindset

Mindset is one of the core topics of The Everyday Marksman, and it's one of the four corners in our pyramid of performance, but I've never planted a flag in the ground about what exactly I mean by, "Mindset." So let's fix that.

In the last episode, I discussed the Martial Marksman ideal and how it relates to the various topics I talk about here. One of the challenges that anyone going down this path quickly runs into is the fact that there is a lot of “stuff” to learn and practice. It’s one thing for a professional soldier to do these things, but it’s a very different beast for Everyday Marksmen like you and I.

This is a philosophical one. For the last month or so, I've been obsessed with an Ancient Greek concept of excellence and how to apply it. Today's post is about presenting the core concepts and how I think it works within the construct of The Everyday Marksman. At a broader scale, this will weave throughout my work and form the bedrock what I want you to achieve.

Today I'm discussing a concept that's been brewing in the the back of my brain. While working on the book, I've needed a way to illustrate how different things we do relate to improving the whole and take use to new levels of performance. I think I've figured it out, and this is my first go at explaining it.

Too many people are looking for the easy out, as if finding the one perfect piece of gear, or just the right training technique, will take them to the next level of capability. But that's not true. Success and failure are lagging indicators of our choice to make deposits or take withdrawals from our internal investment account.

While reading through some of Coach Dan John's work, I came across a philosophy for breaking your annual training cycles. It's impossible to do everything well all of the time- something must give. Instead, we should think of our training, all of our training, from two perspectives: the bus bench, and the park bench.

Like many enthusiast topics, we've got a problem with flex culture. What is that? Today we're talking about it, how it manifests, why its a problem, and what you can do to combat it.

Everyone loves talking about optimization. Entire industries spend huge amounts of money convincing you that their new whiz bang gadget or service will take you to the next level with no additional skill required. Today I'm putting a stake in the ground to tell you that optimum is a myth, and our constant pursuit of it only detracts us from focusing on what's actually important for our success.

I've been having a lot of conversations lately about the right mixture of skills, equipment, communications, and other elements of a theoretical emergency situation. With that, it's time to revisit Scenario-X, our fictional disaster first introduced in the load carriage series. In this post, I want to build out my thoughts a bit more and discuss some of the nuances and reasoning behind it. Why? Well, because it's going underpin a lot of things coming up soon.