Intentional: How to Live, Love, Work and Play Meaningfully
by David Amerland
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GENRE: Non-fiction/smart book
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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.
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Excerpt:
Because all this is serious I can afford to be flippant, though as you will see even my flippancy has a very serious intent. So, I will add here that the one ‘rule’ we all need to keep in mind is that favourite of William S. Burroughs’ from his Naked Lunch “Nothing is true; everything is permitted”. Burrough, of course, borrowed this from Vladimir Bartol, who used it in his novel Alamut. Bartol, himself borrowed it, and slightly changed it in the process, from the teachings of Hassan-i Sabbah who was the founder of the Order of the Assassins, historically known as the Nizari Assassins. The tale, writings and doctrine of the Order was incorporated in the storyline of the popular video game Assassin’s Creed which is where I first came across it and filed it away for future reference which brings us to here and now. You reading what I’ve written.
What do we, what can we learn from this? That life is circuitous but the circuit has polygonal junctures with cultural jumps and bends that require an open mind and a thirst for cultural learning in order for the metaphorical dots to connect? Or, that nothing is truly original, that everything is borrowed from somewhere else and made to fit the moment and its time?
Both, I’d argue. If you are truly living and if you truly feel alive you are aware of both context and history. Moment and time. Alamut was written as an implied rebuke to Mussolini’s fascism. Naked Lunch is a chronicle of the messiness of life and its often unplanned trajectory where the brain makes sense of basically senseless moments of existence. This book is about learning to behave in ways that help you get more out of your life.
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AUTHOR Bio and Links:
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: https://davidamerland.com/seo-blog/1429-where-you-can-buy-a-copy-of-intentional-how-to-live-love-work-and-play-meaningfully.html
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GIVEAWAY INFORMATION
David Amerland will be awarding a $25 Amazon/BN GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.
a Rafflecopter giveaway
What is your book about?
Intentional: How to Live, Love, Work and Play Meaningfully is the work of three years’ worth of research in the worlds of neuroscience, social psychology and anthropology. It is based on my previous book The Sniper Mind which itself represented a groundbreaking, three-year-long dive into the same fields of research. Despite this apparently daunting complexity the book is written in a very conversational style to answer a seemingly simple question: “How do I behave in each situation I encounter in my life?”
To honestly answer that question as completely as possible we must tackle subjects such as identity, motivation, beliefs, values, goals and intentions. These are the modules that make up a person which we usually address in a holistic way when we talk about “character”. When viewed individually and analyzed we see that each of these plays a role in behavior. And behavior are the actions we engage in as a result of stimuli we receive from our external environment.
Intentional then is a guide here. It helps us understand why we behave in some of the ways we do and then how to modulate that so we can behave better.
Who is your hero/heroine? Is he/she based on someone in real life?
This is a non-fiction title so everything in it is based on research and real-life, and yet somehow we manage to find both Captain America and Spiderman mentioned in its pages. I know this sounds like a little teaser so I will leave it here and let you discover how this happens.
What are your favorite times for writing? Morning? Evening?
Life is always chaotic and even the best-planned days can go awry very quickly. So when I write I focus more on completing a specific number of words per day than when I actually write. In short, I write when I can. But, I always write.
Who are your favorite authors? Did they influence your writing, and if so, how?
I grew up wanting to write like Robert Ludlum or Frank Herbert and both writers’ styles now are a little bit outdated. Writing is always a product of its place in time and culture. So, these days, I have no role model when it comes to writing. This helps keep me honest. I strive to make every book better than the one before and every mistake I make in that regard is entirely mine.
Did you have a favorite book as a child? Did it influence your choice to become an author?
I was fortunate enough to grow up in a house which had a full-stocked library. I was read to from very young and I was helped to read better the moment I could. The same adults who so wonderfully helped me do that were not around to supervise what I read. As an eight and nine-year-old I cut my teeth reading Moby Dick, Lady Chatterley’s Lover and The Last Of The Mohicans. Traditional children’s books with fairy tales came into my reading a lot later, as a teen when I started reading them for the sociological undertones and social modelling in them.
Did the books I read as a child make me want to become a writer? I remember that, at the time, they made me want to be a whaler, an estate manager or a frontiersman. In retrospect, through the lens of neuroscience, we now know that what they did is rewire part of my young, developing brain to model the complexities of the worlds depicted in those books and the countless others I read which made me want to be a cowboy out seeking justice, a detective who was comfortable dealing with the social strata of a large city’s nightlife or an inventor who was willing to risk his life to experience the adventure of his creations.
I guess this rewiring, which happens even to adult brains when we read a book, then enhanced the narrative-creation drive of my brain. It led me to see life as a narrative waiting to be told and I was more than willing to do the telling.
Did I have a choice? In Intentional: How to Live, Love, Work and Play Meaningfully I document how the young, developing brain has all the hallmarks of the character that will emerge in adulthood by the time it is seven. There is now a sizeable corpus of research supporting this idea. So, no. I had no choice but to be a writer. It is something which I felt as a physical need by the time I was nine or ten. Because writing was not seen as a respectable profession in my parents’ house I chose Chemical Engineering and graduated with an MSc in Quantum Mechanical Perturbations In Laminar Flow Processes. Writing, however, was what I was not what I did. I only truly feel alive when I write. That’s when things make sense in my head.
Thanks for hosting!
ReplyDeleteThank you so much for hosting rhis and for all the great questions!
ReplyDeleteI liked the excerpt, thank you.
ReplyDeleteSounds like a good book.
ReplyDeleteGreat interview and I liked the excerpt, Intentional sounds like an excellent inspirational read for me! Thanks for sharing it with me and have a great day!
ReplyDeleteThanks for the great excerpt. I've put this on my reading list.
ReplyDelete