About:
The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort To Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self by Michael Easter is a self-help/personal development/travelogue of things the author learned, or enforced, during a hunting trip in Alaska. Mr. Easter is an educator, as well as a columnist and editor for men’s health magazines.
- 320 pages
- Publisher : Rodale Books
- Language : English
- ISBN-10 : 0593138767
My rating for The Comfort Crisis – 3
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More Books by Michael Easter*
Thoughts:
I read this book as part of The Pump Club book club, a life-changing fitness/nutrition/health app run by Arnold Schwarzenegger, Daniel Ketchel, Adam Bornstein, and their team. This is the first book picked by the team, and I’m looking forward to discussing it with the club’s members and the author.
The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter makes several good points. We’re too comfortable, too fat, challenge ourselves for you, not for social media clicks, challenges should be achievable but make you uncomfortable.
I do believe in struggle (to a point), and I do think we’re “too comfortable” in all aspects of our existence. From living our daily lives to not being challenged intellectually.
The hunting trip in Alaska for five weeks does sound amazing, I’m sure he learned a lot about himself during those five months. The trip certainly reinforced the lessons he introduced in the book, but the real information is within the research he cites. The trip only wealthy people with ample spare time can take might not be the best example of being all-in. After all, the team had a plane to extricate them at their beck and call.
I don’t agree with Mr. Easter about several things, his examples of things without a risk of failure (his Eagle Scout project) is misguided. Failure is not the point of the project. It’s to use what you learned over years of failure. Much like a dojo’s test to move up a level in martial arts, the good dojos won’t let you test until you are almost guaranteed to pass, it’s to celebrate an achievement, and the actual test is done over the previous weeks or months.
And you can “fail” by not being allowed the promotion test.
This is done in many other challenges, you can’t just “enter” the Boston Marathon, you had to qualify. You can’t just “go” to a five week hunting trip in Alaska, you had to prove yourself to your guides that you’re not going to break after two days and ruin it.
I do, however, agree with many things discussed, being uncomfortable has advantages, nothing is permanent, weight gain happens all at once and the gain is maintained, fasting is good, quite is important, and more. The book does inspire me to go out and do more stuff. The Alaska trip sounds amazing, but I doubt I’ll ever have the funds or time to do something like that.
Buy The Comfort Crisis from Amazon.com*
More Books by Michael Easter*
Zohar — Man of la Book
Disclaimer: I bought this book
*Amazon links point to an affiliate account, the money is usually spent on books
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