Intentional: How to Live, Love, Work and Play Meaningfully
by David Amerland
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
BLURB:
Live
your life the way you want to. Manage stress better. Be more resilient and
enjoy meaningful relationships and better health. We all want that. Such life
leads to better choices, better jobs, loving romantic partners, more rewarding
careers and decisions that are fully aligned with our aims.
What stops us from
getting all that is the complexity of our brain and the complicated way in
which the external world comes together. The misalignment between the internal
states we experience and the external circumstances we encounter often leads to
confusion, a lack of clarity in our thinking and actions that are not
consistent with our professed values.
Intentional is a
gameplan. It helps us connect the pieces of our mind to the pieces of our life.
It shows us how to map what we feel to what has caused those feelings,
understand what affects us and what effects it has on us and determine what we
want, why we want it and what we need to do to get it.
When we know what to do, we know how to behave. When we know how to behave we know how to act. When we know how to act, we know how to live. Our actions, each day, become our lives. Drawn from the latest research from the fields of neuroscience, behavioral and social psychology and evolutionary anthropology, Intentional shows you how to add meaning to your actions and lead a meaningful, happier, more fulfilling life on your terms.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Excerpt:
From a conceptual perspective history is easy to read. The 19th century was all about industrialization. We harnessed machines to augment manual labor by many degrees of magnitude. The 20th century was about achieving efficiencies of scale so the machines that create our goods could run better and produce more at lower cost. The 21st century is about resilience as the production hubs and supply networks we have created are stress-tested to the limit.
The global pandemic that started in the closing months of
2019 acted as a catalyst that accelerated change everywhere. The additional
environmental and psychological pressure it piled up became a scalpel that
exposed all our weaknesses. The one attribute that would perhaps have allowed
us all to weather the Covid-19 storm better, that would have allowed our
systems of governance and systems of trade to weather it better: resilience,
appeared to be missing from our arsenal. Interestingly, this is where values
come in.
There is a chain of causal attributes we need to work our way through now. For example, we can’t talk about values without tackling personality and we can’t tackle personality without discussing traits.
Traits, in turn, affect goals, motivation and behavior. We need to spell out the difference between personality and character, two qualities that are often used interchangeably, and we also must define the difference between traits and values which are also two qualities that are also misunderstood and are often used interchangeably.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Talking with David Amerland
What is your writing environment?
Pre-pandemic I used to travel round
the globe and have visited, at last count over 20 countries on three
continents. I am completely digital. My notes exist in the cloud. My office is
where my laptop is. All my scheduling is done on my phone and all my books and
research files are on my tablet or rather I sue my tablet to access them but
they are in the cloud and I can access them from any device.
My writing environment then depends on the day and the moment. I have written entire chapters on planes, airports and trains. I sometimes write at Starbucks when I travel, mainly because it is a familiar environment and allows me to switch off enough so I can write.
These days, however, I am most
likely to be at home when I am writing. I have a summer house in Greece, within
walking distance from the beach that has 360 views. Where I write there depends
on the time of day, the temperature outside and the wind. I’ve found that I don’t
need any particular environment the help me be creative, productive or focused.
These are attributes I bring to the table as part of my work as a writer. So,
all I need is a powerful laptop (I tend to have a gazillion tabs open on my
browser all at the same time) and a fast internet connection and I can then do
my thing.
What is your writing process?
Like most writers I have good days and bad days. On the good days everything I think of and write shines like a gem. The words come easily to me, the examples I think of are brilliant and I can synthesize complex research into everyday, conversational writing without ever trying. On bad days someone’s sneaked in during the night and severed the connection between the thoughts inside my head and the fingertips that make them manifest on screen. I’ve had days when after working hard for two-three hours and writing up to 3,000 words I just deleted them afterwards.
I have one rule: good day or bad day I will write. This is key when I am writing a book. The process of writing gets rid of all the bad writing that’s in my head. Once bad writing is out on the screen I then have space for good writing to work its way up from the depths of my brain.
Because I use writing as a means to explore my ideas I find that I never get writer’s block. There has never been an instance, in my entire life when I looked at the screen and my brain was blank. But there have been more than a few instances when something I wrote that I thought was ‘brilliant’ turns out to be, on subsequent reading, bilge. I find though that I can work to improve bad writing once it is already on the screen. So this is a process that works perfectly for me.
What authors have caught your interest lately and why?
I am currently going through a phase
where I read a lot of fantasy and speculative fiction. Brandon Sanderson is an
author whose books I love. I also read Ursula K. Le Guin which is amazing because
her fiction continues to push the boundaries and she is an author I read when I
was just a teen. I also like Robert Jordan and his Wheel of Time books.
It’s important for me to read fiction and fantasy when I am writing non-fiction
otherwise I subconsciously copy the voice of the writer of a non-fiction book
and that means I lose my own.
What was your inspiration for this particular book?
How do we know how to behave? Where does
the knowledge we think we possess on this come from? What makes some types of
behavior acceptable and some others not in specific contexts? These are
questions that are easy to ask and difficult to answer? Like most seemingly
simple things they have a way of revealing a universe of underlying
complexities the moment we begin to delve too deep. So, I delved deep. The fact
that we don’t know the answer to these questions is to me the root of many of
our modern problems. Our lack of faith in the institutions that serve us, our
inability to create forms of governance that serve us better, societies that
have fragmented and have low trust and a low sense of civic duty, these are all
issues that are behavioral. In a person behavior is character but in a society
(or a company) it is culture. Culture determines what happens because it
establishes the norms that guide us. You can see now, I hope, how all these things
are related and how unravelling them and understanding them better empowers us.
What is your favorite scene in your new release?
It is funny to think that non-fiction books have scenes. Yet they do. A scene is a specific montage of words that conjures an image in the reader’s mind and guides them to understand what is happening on the page, sufficiently, for them to suspend disbelief and become engaged in the make-believe world of fictional writing.
Non-fiction writing also involves scenes. Again we use words to conjure up images that, in this case, simplify complex issues and dense ideas and create a verisimilitude in the reader’s mind that helps them engage so that they can better understand what the book is about and how they can benefit from it.
In Intentional I had to convey simply some of the neurochemical
and neurobiological processes that govern our sense of grit, our motivation,
our beliefs and our values. There are a lot of complex interactions that happen
in the central nervous system that connects our body and brain and these turn
sensations we receive from the outside world into signals we interpret inside
ourselves. It took some time for me to work out how to best write the passages
that bring all this complexity to life for the reader in a way that is easy to
understand.
What are you working on now and when can we expect it to be available?
Like most experienced writers I now
always work on two-three ideas at a time. This entails thinking about them – a lot.
Doing the preliminary research, creating the skeleton outline, fleshing it out
to maybe 5,000 – 6,000 words and then depending on which idea will gain priority
because my agent things is more saleable building that up to a sales document
that’s between 50,000 and 65,000 words long.
It's my long-winded way of saying that I am, right now, at the “I don’t know” stage so whatever guess I make is likely to be wrong but what I can say by way of a small hint that will make total sense in retrospect is that whichever of my ideas goes forward my next book will be epic.
What do you like to do when you are not writing?
When I am not chasing the clock
because I have to have a specific word count finished each day when I write, I
try to talk to friends over coffee as much as possible, I spend time with my
partner and our dogs, I exercise a lot more and I binge-watch Netflix series I
had put on hold. Writers, are like everyone else when not working. Our job
makes us exceptional at some things the same way elite athletes can do
incredible things in their sport but off-court or off-track they are just like
regular people.
What is one interesting fact about you that readers don’t know?
I am an introvert to the point that
left to my own devices I’d quite happily disengage from the world, social media,
talks, webinars and interviews and just let my work speak for me. Thankfully I
am not that famous that I can do that because that is really bad for my mental
health. So, I stay fully engaged and remind myself that all this work I do, the
blogging, the articles, the videos and even the interviews are part of a process
that demystifies a complex subject to my readers. It is this sense of service
that actually keeps me grounded and working and, most probably, sane.
Top 3 things on your bucket list?
First, meditate every single day for a year. I use meditation in a haphazard way when I am tired or troubled so I can reset and recenter my inner resources. I need to start being more regular in how I meditate because I know we have neuroscientific evidence on its benefits and the way it helps us regulate our emotions.
Second, to bring my 100m sprint back down to under 12 seconds. I used to be able to sprint 100, in 11.43 seconds. That was fifteen years ago. I am now 57 and it’s just over 12 seconds so clearly I have a lot of work to do.
Third, write fiction again. I used
to write literary fiction and literary short stories in the now distant past. I
haven’t written fiction for over twenty years so in many ways I am starting
afresh. It is my intention to bring those old skills back online.
AUTHOR Bio and Links:
David Amerland is a Chemical Engineer with an MSc. in quantum dynamics in laminar flow processes. He converted his knowledge of science and understanding of mathematics into a business writing career that's helped him demystify, for his readers, the complexity of subjects such as search engine optimization (SEO), search marketing, social media, decision-making, communication and personal development. The diversity of the subjects is held together by the underlying fundamental of human behavior and the way this is expressed online and offline. Intentional: How to Live, Love, Work and Play Meaningfully is the latest addition to a thread that explores what to do in order to thrive. A lifelong martial arts practitioner, David Amerland is found punching and kicking sparring dummies and punch bags when he's not behind his keyboard.
Email &
Social Media Accounts:
Reach David via
email: davidamerland@gmail.com
Twitter:
https://twitter.com/DavidAmerland
Medium:
https://davidamerland.medium.com/
LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidamerland/
YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/c/DavidAmerland/about
Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/david_amerland/
Represented by The Knight Agency
For Goodreads Reviews and where to buy the book follow this link:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
GIVEAWAY:
David Amerland will be awarding a $25 Amazon/BN GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.
Thanks for hosting!
ReplyDeleteThank you so much for hosting this and also thank you for some excellent questions!
ReplyDeleteYou are welcome!
DeleteI liked the excerpt.
ReplyDeleteSounds like a good book.
ReplyDelete