I don’t think Seth Godin ever says anything uninteresting — he might be the most profound bald-headed guy since this dude — but I particularly liked this post, in which he describes the three stages of preparation:

The first I’ll call the beginner stage. This is where you make huge progress as a result of incremental effort.

The second is the novice stage. This is the stage in which incremental effort leads to not so much visible increase in quality.

And the third is the expert stage. Here’s where races are won, conversations are started and sales are made. A huge amount of effort, off limits to most people, earns you just a tiny bit of quality. But it’s enough to get through the Dip and be seen as the obvious winner.

Godin’s point is that the middle stage is useless. You have to go through it to get to…

Tags: Tags: expertise, professionalism, publishing, seth godin, writing

Happy New Year … just 14 days after the fact.

Some quick updates:

* I went back to my old site, Male Pattern Fitness, with a guest article. In it, I review my favorite new workout books of the past 12 months, including Adam Campbell’s outstanding Big Book of Exercises.

* I did a really, really fun podcast with Mike Robertson. The goal was to talk about how fitness professionals can improve their writing to move their careers forward, but the most memorable stretch comes when I go off on a spontaneous rant about how annoyed I am by Facebook. I’ve been thinking about it for a while, so I guess it was going to come out sooner or later. Still, it caught both of us by surprise. I just hope it’s as entertaining to you as it was to me when I was getting…

Tags: Tags: books, dad fitness, journalism, mens health, mike robertson, podcast, writing

One of the real joys of the holiday season is reading the annual Christmas letters from family and friends. The best letters manage to be funny, clever, poignant, self-mocking, and most of all brutally honest — quite a trick to pull off with just a few hundred words. 

This I freely admit: My friends inspire me to write better Christmas letters. I won’t say I compete with them — if I did, I’d have to push my kids to be more interesting, and there’s no telling what dark alleys that would lead us toward. I just like to think that the people reading my letters get a kick out of them.

Unfortunately, there’s another kind of holiday letter. The worst are the chirpy ones that stop just short of offering the exact amount of the husband’s annual bonus and photocopies of the kids’ perfect SAT scores. 

We got one today … well, I can’t go…

Tags: Tags: children, christmas, christmas letters, writing

I’ve been resisting the temptation to write about Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers for the past several weeks. But every time I sit down to work on something else, my mind goes back to that book. More specifically, I start thinking about the book’s second chapter, “The 10,000 Hour Rule.” Even more specifically, I come back to the idea that not all hours are created equal.

The book, as you know, is the nation’s #1 nonfiction bestseller at this moment. I think everyone I work with in the fitness business has read it. TC, editor in chief at Testosterone Muscle, wrote about it in his Atomic Dog column more than a month ago. Chad Waterbury recommended it to me even before that, and finally sent me a copy as an early birthday present when I mentioned in early January that I still hadn’t gotten…

Tags: Tags: books, journalism, Media, outliers, publishing, writing

I mentioned in the previous post that, to my shame, I read very few new books this year. And I feel guilty about that, like I’m a traitor to my profession. 

I’m not the only one feeling guilt. Check out this confession by David Streitfeld from last weekend’s New York Times, in which he admits to buying used books from resellers rather than purchasing them new:

Here’s one example of how I casually wreak destruction. I was reading “Sylvia,” an account by the late short-story master Leonard Michaels of his unstable first wife. Looking for material about Mr. Michaels, I saw his friend Wendy Lesser had written a long essay about him in a book published last year by Pantheon. I could buy a new paperback edition of that book, “Room for Doubt,” for $13.95 plus tax in a…

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Tags: Tags: books, personal, writing