709 days without missing a single workout. If you'd told me that ten years ago I'd have laughed at you. I've spent 4+ years being obese and fifteen years failing to train consistently. But the part that surprises people isn't the number as much as this: It took less willpower than attempting to train three times a week ever did. Fifteen years of Mondays When I was obese, the plan was always food. Eat better starting Monday, and this time it would hold. I wasn't training at all in those years,...
12 days ago • 5 min read
I woke up in cold sweat. Held my hand on my chest and counted my pulse in the dark. It was racing. This is the night it happens. Now, I know what you're thinking. Wasn't this supposed to be about drinking? I'll get to that. But the story starts somewhere else. What it actually was At 34, I had begun to fear the silence. That's when it usually came. My fear would show up in my body as a heart attack. I'd wake soaked with my heart galloping, certain the reaper had come early. They were panic...
19 days ago • 5 min read
Everyone assumes the difference between a rich family and a poor one is mainly the number in the bank account. That's not true. I grew up close enough to both to watch the real difference play out, and it had almost nothing to do with how much money was actually in the house. A friend with a stock portfolio worth a million dollars by the time we reached high school. A girlfriend handed $31,000 the day she turned eighteen. My own mother, who gave me a good childhood but always with the...
26 days ago • 4 min read
I was visiting my aunt and her husband in southern Sweden. We had a lovely afternoon. At the end of it we invited them up to Stockholm. It's a 90 minute flight. Hakan answered before my aunt could: "With my health the way it is, we don't travel anymore." He said it flat. Matter of fact, with no self-pity in it at all. "We only take visitors now." These are not people who were ever afraid to go anywhere. They used to spend large parts of the year living in Spain. A year later my mother went to...
about 1 month ago • 6 min read
When I grew up, I looked at my father as a man who had life figured out. He had his own company. He made good money. He had fathered three sons. He always seemed to have a few well-chosen words of wisdom from the generation before him in his back pocket. He was the strong, silent type. A doer more than a talker. As far as I knew, there was nothing he hadn't already figured out. Then, in what felt like a single season, he was applying for jobs he'd once considered beneath him. Driving...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
Most men believe that if they're loyal enough, work hard enough, and stay long enough, their job is safe. I used to believe that too. Then I watched an entire team get erased overnight, with no warning and no evaluation, and I understood something that changed how I think about work permanently. I came in one morning and saw it on the TV in the break room. The year was 2017. I was working as a customer service rep at Telia, Sweden's largest telecom company. Overnight, Telia had axed an entire...
about 2 months ago • 5 min read
I've tried to become a "gym person" for decades. In different cities. Different countries. Even different continents. And every time, I found the same thing. I was surrounded by people, but everyone had their headphones in. Instead of talking between sets, they were on their phones. At most I got the occasional nod from someone who happened to train at the same time as me. In theory, I was surrounded by like-minded people. In practice, I felt far more alone than I did in my own apartment. It...
about 2 months ago • 6 min read
For years, I didn't believe my own words anymore. Not because I was weak. Not because I didn't want it badly enough. But because I kept making the same promise and breaking it in the same way, at the same time, for the same reasons, and somewhere along the way my brain stopped taking me seriously. Here's what the cycle looked like. Monday: clean breakfast, clean lunch, clean dinner. I felt good. Righteous, even. Tuesday: same. I was doing it. This time was different. Tuesday evening: the...
2 months ago • 5 min read
At 20 years old, I read a book that split my understanding of money in two. Robert Kiyosaki's Rich Dad Poor Dad is built around a simple contrast. His own father, "Poor Dad", was highly educated, worked hard, climbed the career ladder, and always struggled with money. His best friend's father, "Rich Dad", had little formal education but understood something about money that schools never teach. The difference wasn't income. It was what each man did with it. Poor Dad worked for money. Rich Dad...
2 months ago • 5 min read