126 The Virtue Of Curiosity: How To Win The Inner Game

'Inner Game' is often synonymized with confidence, but its original usage refers to a game you can play... and win. And winning the inner game is the key to dropping shame, welcoming peak performance, and perhaps even existential fulfillment.

Transcript

The Ruando podcast is an exploration of the unconscious and the game of life.

Be sure to visit ruando.

Com to get a preview chapter of my upcoming book Infinite Play and free access to my content library.

Enjoy the show.

So this month in the Masculine Underground book club we read The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Galway.

And it's my second time reading it.

I read it many years ago.

I think it's one of the best,

Simplest books on entering the flow state,

Entering the zone,

Developing unconscious competence.

But rereading it,

You know,

Maybe five years later,

I picked up some new stuff actually,

Some new applications.

And one was in regards to shame.

So I spoke about different examples in the How to Release Regret episode of little things that I,

We all have things we regret,

Right?

We look back,

Speaking for myself,

For whatever reason,

Every so often I'll remember something stupid I said to someone maybe years ago,

Or a decision I wish I did differently.

Like we all have these things,

Right?

And kind of my go to when my head's on straight and I'm being conscious is when such a thought pops up,

I tend to just be like,

Oh,

I should think about something else,

Right?

Like there's no reason to feed these shameful thoughts.

And I think,

You know,

That's not the worst strategy.

But in rereading this book,

The Inner Game of Tennis,

And looking at his differentiation between judgments and perception and how any kind of judgment,

Even positive judgments,

Can throw off what he calls self to our instinctual side from doing what it knows how to do,

Right?

So when it comes to tennis,

He would say that,

You know,

If you're cheering yourself on or,

You know,

Trying to take credit for a good shot,

Or being hard on yourself for making a bad shot,

Either one of those is yourself one,

You know,

The ego jumping in to interfere with the national process like his,

His whole thing is that within all of us is a natural,

Instinctual learning process that can execute on a lot of things,

If we only stay out of its way.

And I think this is very applicable to flow state exercises,

Certainly like sports,

But also socializing in an organic way,

And also the creative process.

But anyway,

So I was noticing this with random shameful thoughts.

And I was also noticing this another place where I have this negative self talk is lately,

I've been really into playing chess,

I've been playing a lot of chess lately.

And when I make a dumb move,

I often tell myself I made a dumb move.

And this kind of takes me out of the moment,

I tend to make more dumb moves,

I tend to lose games when I when I get into that headspace.

Obviously chess doesn't really matter.

But in that this all applies to how one lives the game of one's life.

You know,

Is a great place to practice.

And I was noticing this and I was noticing these kind of inconsequential places where I essentially shame myself.

Because what shame is,

Shame is an externally motivated correction tool,

Right?

Like whether you feel ashamed about something seemingly serious or ashamed about a little thing or ashamed about not executing on a thing you meant to do or whatever it is,

Whatever the thing is that you might be upset about.

And some way that you are or what Galloway would say yourself one your ego is zooming outside of the situation and finding a way to make yourself wrong.

As I spoke about more extensively in the breaking social constructions of reality episode,

This is your circuit four or our circuit four is the part of our consciousness using Timothy Leary's model that tries to put things in a moral framework of good versus not good or normal versus taboo for the evolutionary purpose of getting along with the group,

Right?

Like it's this is the part of us that is willing to sacrifice our own natural instincts in order to be accepted by the tribe.

This is great on some evolutionary level and in certain situations.

But when it comes to your own personal fulfillment,

What we could liken to say winning the inner game,

Being in that inner game,

Powerful inner game state where you're perfectly at peace and you're fully in touch with your instincts and your creativity,

This is not what we're going for.

So having reread the inner game of tennis,

I looked at all these moments where I shamed myself in a small way.

I made a stupid move.

I said the wrong thing to somebody.

And it's like,

What if I could switch that to perception?

What if I could just make an E prime statements like a clear nonjudgmental statements to myself and with something like chess is pretty easy.

Like instead of saying,

Oh,

You made a stupid move,

It's just like,

It would have been better if I did such and such.

With social faux pas,

I look back and like,

Oh man,

I wish I didn't say that.

Same thing,

Right?

So I became very interested in this idea of what does it really mean to win the inner game?

Obviously you could apply this to games like chess or games like socialization.

What does it mean to win the inner game?

So this is something I pondered a lot in reading about Taoism or these other kinds of philosophies where you become less externally focused,

Less ego driven,

Perhaps trying to enter this oneness with the moment.

There's of course a side that's within most of us,

Certainly within myself of like,

Well,

If you're not focused on external goals,

If you're not focused on achievement,

How will your life improve?

Right?

Like there's like almost kind of a perversion of this kind of accept the moment thing where one can maybe tolerate conditions that are not good for them.

Right?

And that is not appealing to most of us when we think about just accepting everything,

Accepting mediocrity if that's your situation.

So I wanted to come up with something of what does it actually mean to win the inner game?

Because this whole inner game thing is actually not as abstract as a lot of people make it out to be.

Cause I mean,

Nowadays,

If you say the term inner game,

Most people are thinking of game in the sense of a skill set.

Right?

Like I think,

I'm not sure if this is exactly the history of things,

But I think the dating skills community is to blame or,

You know,

Is responsible for this change in definition.

Right?

Like when it comes to social skills,

When someone is talking about a guy's game,

They're talking about how good he is at picking up women.

Right?

Like that's,

You know,

His charisma,

His social skills,

His confidence,

Like that's a guy's game.

Right?

And I think this has been kind of conflated with this term inner game because Galloway,

Who I believe coined the term inner game,

He wasn't talking about game as a skill set or certainly not game as charisma,

Even though confidence and inner game relate.

He was actually talking about a literal game or a game that you play.

Right?

Like there's an outer game of tennis where you're,

You win by scoring 40 points before your opponent.

And then there's an inner game,

Which you can't also win and lose.

So in this episode,

We're going to dig into specifically,

What does it actually mean to win the inner game?

Because when you win the inner game,

That's where you're in that state of pure peace and effortless expression.

When you're winning the inner game,

You're tapping into your maximum potential in your creativity.

You're the closest you're going to get to flow state.

You're basically allowing yourself to perform the best and not get in your way.

Does that mean you're going to hit every shot or come up with every perfect idea or make money on every venture?

Of course not.

But it is playing to your maximum ability.

It's giving you the greatest expected value for whatever your pursuit is.

So the first part about winning the inner game is shifting your perceived success metric from something outside of you to something inside of you or as close to internal as possible.

So I'll give an example from fitness with myself.

I'm very fitness focused.

And even though I try to make goals that are not based in vanity,

Of course I care how I look.

And I notice in myself,

My physique fluctuates as most of us do based on how I eat,

Based on how I exercise.

And I noticed my abs go from visible to non-visible kind of in a cycle.

And I had to think about this for a while.

I had to perceive what is actually going on without judgment.

And I realized every time I can see my abs,

That's when I tend to pig out on cookies and stuff.

Right?

Why?

Because even though I typically,

I mean,

My intention is to not have a vanity metric for fitness.

Of course I care.

Of course my ego cares.

But I actually,

I mean,

This is kind of a way that I cash out on a surplus.

Anytime I see my abs,

I'm like,

Oh,

Look at me.

I'm in great shape.

Look at this external metric.

This is proof that I'm in great shape.

And because some of my,

You know,

Part of my consciousness or my ego is like,

Well,

This is what all that matters.

Of course I can eat cookies.

And naturally the result is when I pig out on cookies and I exercise a little bit less,

My body fat goes up and this external thing goes away.

Whereas if I was really focused on playing the inner game and,

You know,

In game theory,

One of the things that defines a game are the parameters of winning.

If my inner game is based on some internal metric,

Which we're going to talk about in a second,

Then it doesn't matter,

Right?

Whether or not my abs are showing doesn't actually make a difference.

If I have the internal metric of say doing the absolute best thing for my body in every moment,

It shouldn't matter whether what my body looks like,

Whether my arms are a certain size or if my abs are visible or invisible.

If I'm actually playing the inner game for that inner internal success metric of in every moment I'm going to do what's right for my body,

Then I'm not going to eat the cookies.

And I'm using fitness as an example,

But you know,

I think something similar occurs with money.

I mean,

Money is one of the,

I mean,

It's probably the most universal external metric that most of us care about,

Right?

Like I'll,

You know,

I know a lot of entrepreneurs like myself or salespeople when I was a salesperson,

I was victim to this too.

Anytime I had a really good month because I was focused on the money,

That's when I would start slacking off.

And the result is you end up going back to your original income.

This is something Brian Tracy talks about,

The sales trainer,

Of how people tend to earn,

Salespeople tend to earn whatever their self-concept is,

Right?

If they're under what they think they should be earning,

Of course they hustle to make more.

But he's seen a lot of salespeople who have like a lucky month or a really good month and they are doing way better than they normally do.

What happens?

They end up slacking off the rest of the month so their earnings end up being exactly where it is,

Right?

So you kind of mystify this concept of like,

You know,

You earn based on your relationship to money if you want to go in that direction.

But more tangibly or more concretely,

Many of us,

If we're focused on the outside,

If we're focused on this external metric of like how you look or the money in your bank account,

Then it takes you,

It allows you to detract from what is the right action in every moment.

The same thing with money can be applied to a lot of people got into crypto trading with this last bull run.

And a lot of us,

Myself included,

When we're on these highs,

When we're,

You know,

Making these big profits,

It's very easy to break your own rules or,

You know,

Break the fundamentals of what you know is correct,

Because it seems like no matter what you do,

The money's going up.

I know a lot of people and I've had some big losses myself because I stopped listening to what I knew was the right thing to do in every moment.

Also experienced this in poker at the poker table.

A lot of guys make stupid mistakes when they're up or when they're down.

Either way,

They're focused on this external amounts,

Right?

Like any really good disciplined poker player will tell you that in every moment,

You don't think about the money you've spent.

You know,

That's sunk costs.

You don't think about how much you're up or down.

Every moment is an independent,

Unique decision,

Right?

Of course,

A lot of us get caught up on the externals and then we lose track of that.

So a simple process that you can use to combat against this is to instead of,

You know,

To just switch from external goals to being like,

I'm just going to be one with the moment.

Like that's kind of a big jump and it's,

You know,

It's kind of a hard thing to grasp,

Right?

If it was that easy,

We would all be in super Zen mode all the time.

So one way to do this is to reduce the distance between or reduce the time span between this moments and your success or fail metrics.

So one example,

I'll use fitness as an example,

You know,

Switching from an outcome goal of the goal that a lot of people have,

Want to get a six pack to the process goal of what are you going to do,

Right?

So a simple movement there is instead of focusing on,

Let me get a six pack by Memorial Day,

You said,

Make your goal.

I'm going to go to the gym three times a week,

Right?

That's an input,

Right?

It's not an output and you have more control over going to the gym three times a week.

It is something that can give you a win every time you do it in the short term,

Right?

Like every couple of days you can have that win.

It's still an external win,

Right?

But it's an external win that's closer to your internal control.

But then even that can be reduced as well,

Right?

So it is also easy and I've fallen victim to this myself with my own fitness goals of,

You know,

I get caught up in this sometimes where I pick a fitness plan,

Like I'll follow,

I'll get a new plan by Charles Polikin or Pavel Satsouleh and I'll be like,

I'm going to go hard with this workout plan,

Like whatever the protocol is.

And I'm going to do this number of reps in a week or I'm going to go for this amount of time or I'm going to do this exercise,

You know,

However many sets.

And there's a way that you can kind of,

Again,

Detract from the inner game or you can lose the inner game by focusing on these kind of arbitrary metrics.

So I'll say I've gotten injured a lot and not given myself the rest and basically ultimately made myself less healthy and less fit because I was so obsessed with following a certain program to the tee.

So instead of,

You know,

Going to the gym X number of times or following a program on X days is a little bit closer to the internal game than get a six pack by June.

An even closer one is I'm going to do the exact number of sets and reps that make my body feel good,

Right?

So now we're getting to a point where we're getting to a point where you have to be honest with your subjective experience,

Right?

It's easy if you have a habit of quitting or making excuses to not go,

It's easy to use this as an excuse.

But that's part of the game.

That's part of the inner game is you're not bullshitting yourself,

Right?

So we can even bring this down to I'm going to do this rep perfectly,

Right?

So instead of the success metric being way far off in the future,

You know,

You losing a certain amount of weight instead of it being you're going to go to the gym a certain number of times,

You're reducing it and making it closer and closer to this moment of I'm doing this exact rep.

But if you're going to have the time span between your doing and your pass fail be that close,

What are you doing in between reps?

Are you resting the perfect amount?

Is your posture perfect?

Are you and ultimately all of these things always come back to what's kind of I mean sounds cliche if you're talking about mindfulness.

But if you keep reducing this with anything else,

I'm using fitness as an example,

You could use money as an example or,

Or whatever,

Talking to people as an example,

Making videos,

Writing as an example.

If you keep going all the way back,

How do I reduce this?

How do I reduce this?

How do I reduce this and make it closer and closer to instant,

Where you'll always end up reducing to is breathing,

Right?

I mean,

Every mindfulness anything talks about the importance of breathing,

Which brought me back to this whole thing about shame.

I know this this made these ideas maybe don't seem connected,

But for me they are because in these moments that I'm feeling shame,

Whether it's in the middle of a game of stupid move,

I made or a social faux pas or or even the positive side of like me thinking I'm the shit because I just schooled someone on the chessboard or in real life or slammed on someone verbally or whatever.

If I'm if I don't have some attention on my breathing,

Or some attention on how my body feels,

Right,

And there's other things you can focus on them breathing,

The feeling of your heart beating in your chest,

Which most of us can feel if we actually get still enough and stop thinking,

Stop thinking in words,

Right?

This goes back to every every mindfulness teaching you can ever come across power of now whatever right comes down to the same thing of if you're actually in the moment,

You're essentially winning the inner game.

And when you're actually in the moment,

As every sports psychologist will tell you,

When you enter that flow state that zone,

That's when your instincts are able to come online and respond to things immediately.

If you caught my my very long sciency episode on how to develop physiological toughness,

Spoke about how as as proven in clinical trials and proven by science,

Your your muscular nervous system can react hundreds of milliseconds faster than your consciousness,

Right?

And that's essentially what instincts are,

Right?

Like the flinch reflex,

Or if you see what seems like a predator,

Your body might react before your mind can even get a sense of things.

We're talking about sports when someone's super in the zone.

That's essentially it,

Right?

Like I can think of times that I happen to be in the zone for whatever reason,

Playing a sport,

Combat sports,

Rugby,

Whatever,

The times that I did cool shit.

It always happened before my consciousness knew what was going on,

Right?

It always happened where,

Of course,

Yeah,

My ego was like,

Oh,

Yeah,

I did.

I did that awesome thing.

But it wasn't really anything my consciousness was doing,

Right?

It was my instincts,

But for whatever reason,

I was able to get out of my own way.

Because ultimately,

What allows you or what constitutes winning the inner game is being fully engaged in the moment.

Can you be fully engaged with what's going on with what's going on in your reality in your exact moment,

Right?

So Galloway speaks about being aware of everything you hear in a given moment and see and feel right,

Those three main senses.

If you're really aware of what's going on in your periphery of everything you can see,

If you're really aware of every little sound that you can hear,

And I would say most importantly,

This is kind of like the definition of being grounded,

Fully aware of how your body feels,

Then by,

You know,

By necessity,

You're in the moment.

So being focused and being in the moment is a lot easier said than done,

Especially nowadays with all the media that we have and the experience of the modern person with his constant distractions,

You know,

Active forces that are trying to take away your focus essentially,

It can be quite difficult.

And most of us know the importance of paying attention and focus and having a good attention span.

And,

You know,

A lot of people,

Especially in the self-help world,

Kind of take this judgmental approach to it,

Right?

Where you have to use willpower to be disciplined and focused and yes,

Like doing exercises to increase your attention span,

Doing things that increase your attention span rather than decrease it like social media,

I think is all a good thing.

But there's another way to increase your focus and that is to become interested.

I think interest is one of the most important virtues in of itself.

And actually,

Another way to say winning the inner game is like,

If you are really,

Really,

Really interested in what you're doing or what you're experiencing at given moments,

You by definition are winning.

I mean,

You can think of any moments where maybe you're dissatisfied,

You know,

Think of,

You know,

Maybe an awkward moment on a date or an uncomfortable moment if you're speaking on a stage or an unsure moment if you're an entrepreneur and you're in business and you don't know what's going to happen and it feels not good.

Think of any moment that feels not good,

Then imagine what it would be like if you could become fully,

Fully interested.

And actually,

I've mentioned this in another episode,

But like kind of my goal,

My secret goal whenever I'm coaching someone one on one is essentially to get them to become super interested in their problems and I trust that they will come up with a better solution than I could even come up with,

Right?

Like a lot of people get stuck in life whether,

You know,

Most people reach out to me for help with dating and relationships or creative purpose and things like that.

You know,

Obviously I have tips and tricks,

But I trust that if someone can get really interested in their lives,

They're not going to be stuck and they'll actually come up with their own best solution,

Right?

Like it's not on me to know exactly how someone should live their life.

And when we think about some of the things that plague most people,

I think especially men in the social media era,

Like a lot of guys are stuck in what we call anhedonia or apathy.

This essentially,

What is apathy?

It's like a lack of interest,

A lack of curiosity in your life.

Like things just become,

Everything is meh and you start to feel nihilistic and that's where,

You know,

Mental health tends to really decline.

And it can be challenging now because with all of the addictive things that are thrown at people,

Like actually,

So it's a bit of an aside,

But I've dabbled with running ads for my stuff,

For my work on porn sites.

So I did some research.

It was research,

Trust me,

Just to see what kinds of ads are there.

And the ads that seem to do the best on porn sites literally are advertising how addictive they are.

They're usually like,

You know,

Usually porn sites advertising other porn sites or these like porn video games that I guess have become a thing.

They literally like in their ad copy,

It's like,

This is the most addicting game ever.

Like,

And it was kind of bizarre to me reading this.

It was like,

People are actually attracted to things that will be addictive and like,

Yeah,

It does make sense.

Someone who doesn't know what is interesting in their life.

They're not actually engaged with reality.

They're definitely not winning the inner game.

Of course,

They relish an opportunity to be addicted to something.

And by addicted,

I mean like,

Drawn,

Like their attention is drawn into something that actually doesn't fulfill them.

Right?

So like,

Addiction can kind of look like curiosity or being really interested,

But they're very different.

So one way to cultivate interest is this thing we mentioned earlier of finding a success metric that is smaller and smaller,

Right?

But it's still attached to maybe some external outcome you do care about,

Right?

So like,

You know,

There's many reasons why people want to go to the gym and get fit.

Maybe you want to,

And many of them can be external.

You want to look a certain way.

Great.

You want to have a certain level of sports performance.

Also great.

External thing and it's great.

But can you also attach that external thing and put more attention on something smaller and smaller that leads to it,

Right?

It's totally fine to want to look good at the beach.

It's totally,

You know,

It's great to like want a certain,

You want to lift a certain amount to impress your buddies,

Even though maybe by itself doesn't really mean anything,

Right?

But if you focus on that,

As we mentioned,

You're going to lose the inner game.

Whereas if you take the inner goal,

Change it into a process goal,

Make the process smaller and smaller and smaller till in every moment you're doing the right thing to serve that that greater intention,

That future intention.

That's how you win the inner game.

That's also one way to cultivate deeper interest and therefore deeper focus.

The other thing that can help you cultivate interest and therefore focus is to pick things where you can improve on skills,

Right?

So I mean,

I know I sound like a nerd,

But like for whatever reason,

I got into chess recently and I've played chess on and off like my whole life,

But I never really got into it the way I am now.

And one of the reasons why I'm so into it now is that I've actually like learned a little bit about how to play chess and realizing like there's so much to know.

Like there's this deep,

Deep rabbit hole of different attacks and gambits and defenses and different types of strategies and patterns.

It's like almost an endless chain where I get to learn more things and do more things and see how I'm getting better and better.

And that in itself,

You know,

I'm not playing chess out of willpower.

I'm actually becoming kind of like obsessed with it because there's something consistently new for me to engage with,

Right?

It is kind of hard on anyone to do the same thing over and over and get the same results over and over.

You know,

For anyone who's self-employed,

It's a lot easier to be interested in something when you can see your numbers go up,

Right?

Like you're learning more and you're getting more views,

Right?

Or you're getting more downloads to your podcast or you're making more money,

Obviously.

Those wins,

Even though they are external,

They give you an opportunity to stay fascinated,

Right?

It's hard to stick with a business where you make zero dollars over and over and over again,

Right?

So if we take this kind of like kind of Taoist approach to business,

It's like you're not trying to win the inner game so you can make money.

It's you're trying to find ways to make money so that you can keep yourself interested enough to keep winning the inner game.

Right?

So I want to say this again,

Right?

If you're watching this video and I'll just keep using money as the example,

Right?

Let's say you're self-employed or you plan on being self-employed.

Maybe you tried some stuff,

Sometimes you're motivated,

Sometimes you're not.

This also applies to anything creative,

Right?

Creative resistance.

Most of us,

If we've become interested in this idea of inner game,

There's maybe a performance motivation,

Right?

Like,

Oh,

If I could have a solid inner game or if I could win this inner game,

Then I'll make more money,

Right?

What if,

Just in this experiment,

You flip it,

Right?

What if you make your ultimate goal to win the inner game by being super present?

And everything else is to serve that,

Which means in order to keep yourself focused to keep winning the inner game,

In order to keep yourself interested in whatever that pursuit is,

You need to kind of feed your ego wins in order to keep yourself playing the inner game,

Right?

So with fitness,

It's like,

Yeah,

You got to do some stuff to make your ego feel good so that yourself continues to enjoy getting in every perfect rep at the gym.

Yeah,

I use the money example.

You got to find wins to keep yourself interested.

You have to,

Once in a while,

Get some validation from the outside world,

Not because you value the validation by itself,

But the validation will keep your ego engaged so you can keep developing competence and stay focused and win the inner game.

What if you viewed everything like that?

So it is kind of a spiritual way of looking at things,

Perhaps the Taoist way of looking at things where you're flipping that carton horse,

Where if you can buy this idea that the most important thing in life is to engage with reality with enthusiasm,

One,

It kind of,

I mean,

It does take away your dependence on outcome,

Right?

And if you're completely independent of outcome,

Or if you're completely independent of external factors,

It's impossible for you to feel shame,

Right?

You are winning if you are engaged with reality with enthusiasm.

You're winning if you are completely focused and immersed in what you're doing.

And the cool thing is the second thing,

Which takes maybe again,

Maybe a little bit of faith to buy,

But if you've ever played sports or done a creative pursuit,

I'm sure you have an experience of this,

Of when you're doing what we're calling winning the inner game,

Of being completely immersed in like in the state of no mindedness where you're fully engaged with reality,

That seems to be where the best performance comes out.

No one writes beautiful poetry or music or even writes great like by like forcing or like trying to control everything,

Right?

Like no one can write beautiful prose from their ego.

Same thing of like,

Just physiologically,

Your conscious mind cannot react fast enough to be good at sports,

Right?

If you're thinking too much,

You're definitely not in the zone,

You're definitely not going to have perfect timing,

You're definitely not going to be at peak performance,

Right?

All of these external things that all of us do care about or our egos do care about,

Just by itself not a bad thing,

All of the things that are external are actually easier to achieve when you're in that state,

When you're in that winning state of inner game.

So it is,

You know,

It can be a little tricky.

It can be a little bit tricky for your ego to wrap its head around because,

You know,

If you're approaching this of like,

I want to make money and I want to be good at sports and I want to be charismatic in social situations,

It's very easy for it to jump back in and try to control this inner game.

But that's what you have to not do,

Right?

Winning the inner game is simply engaging with reality with full enthusiasm.

Because in the end,

And the reason why I call this kind of spiritual is that it does require trust in order to surrender and let go of control and trust that if you set up the conditions right and play this inner game,

You will come up with the best creative output,

You will come out with the best sports performance,

You will come up with the perfect thing to say when you're on the date or the,

You know,

The perfect idea for whatever you do to make money.

Like if you,

It does require a little bit of trust,

Which we can liken to any kind of spiritual faith of like putting it in God's hands or trusting the muses or whatever,

Whatever you want to look at it.

You can just say this is trusting your unconscious or your higher self.

But it does mean actually trusting and letting go of control and doing what is your role of your conscious role,

Which is to win the inner game.

So that whole adage that most of us heard as kids,

It's not whether you win or lose,

It's how you play the game.

We could re-say this or re-state that as it's not about whether you win or lose the external game.

It is about how you win the internal game.

Like how you play the game,

You know,

There is a way to win and lose that internal game.

You win the internal game and you'll probably win the most,

Right?

So like this whole idea,

You know,

When it's said to kids,

It's usually like don't cheat or don't get butt hurt.

You know,

Don't take the external game so seriously because if you win that internal game,

You will win at life more.

It takes a little bit of faith,

But most of us,

If we've experienced life for a while,

Probably know that there's some truth to that.

And of course,

Don't forget to breathe.

That's the most important thing.

This month,

Which is August 2021,

My book club is reading Bushido by Inozo Nitobe.

Bushido,

Of course,

Is the code of ethics of the way of the Japanese warrior,

The samurai.

We're reading this book from 1899.

That is a classic.

Don't forget to breathe.

Goodbye.

We're safe again.