Wild Newsletter Aug 5, 2017

The Wild Newsletter By Wild Foods

Dear Wildling,

I hope you enjoy this week’s Wild Newsletter.

As always, we welcome feedback and comments!

Enjoy.

Yours in Health,

-Colin Stuckert, Wild Foods Founder

Wild Product Spotlight

Wild Coffee beans are roasted fresh in Austin and hand-delivered to us twice a week.

We aim to offer some of the freshest coffee you can get online. Check out the full Wild Coffee line.

(Hint: What you get in the store is a month old, at least for even local products, and months old for the big brands. Yuck.)

Book Of The Week

Disrupted.

This is a fun book. I enjoyed it on Audible.

Wild Guide Of The Week

I’m super proud of our team’s work on the Wild Blog. It’s loaded with valuable articles, past newsletters (this one), recipes, and more.

Check out the Wild Blog.

Podcast Of The Week

This episode is not work/family safe. Profanity and some progression ideas in this episode, but also some real gold relating to the preconceived cultural nonsense foisted upon us all.

Aubrey Marcus #107: My Ego Is So Much Smaller Than Yours, Bro with JP Sears

Article Of The Week

Some good stuff in this piece.

How To Live A Full Life (And Leave Nothing On The Table) By 30

CEO Corner – Quote Of The Week

“The object of knowledge is constantly changing. Feeling, tasting, sensational experiments, etc., are dogmas and not true knowledge, as they can be wrong. Objects of perception, therefore, are ruled out of true knowledge.”

-Bruce Lee

Every day I win the cosmic lottery because I receive another 24 hours on a giant rock called Earth, where I partake in this amazing life with my fellow creatures called homo sapiens.

(BTW, and not surprising considering we named ourselves, homo sapiens is Latin for “wise man.”)

I get caught up in the mucky muck of life on each of these lucky days I receive, just like everyone else.

I like to take a step back and observe life for what it is: the greatest Gift the Universe has ever seen.

You gain some powerful perspectives when you ep back and look at what’s going on.

Consider that the odds of a single human being born is something like 300 trillion to one AGAINST happening.

Or, at any minute, a major catastrophic event could wipe out humanity in the blink of an eye, just like the dinosaurs.

Or the fact that if that catastrophic event hadn’t wiped out the dinosaurs, humans wouldn’t be here today.

Or the fact that time will eventually erode into nothingness everything you and I have ever known.

On the one hand, this is depressing.

But since there’s nothing you and I can do about it, we have only one choice.

This: Make the best of every second by focusing on what we can control.

This seems obvious and should come quickly to humans considering the situation we find ourselves in.

Yet the vast majority of people take for granted the Universe’s Great Gift by mucking around in a chronic state of self-inflicted suffering.

We all do it. Everyone.

We all suffer because the human gene has been sculpted through millions of years in the harsh environment found on Earth.

Things have changed.

The modern world has removed the vast majority of trials that would have kept our ancestors busy (and happy).

This is what humans are designed for: struggle.

We are not designed for the world we live in now, defined by convenience and excess.

And that’s why there’s a thing known as negativity bias that seems to be the default framework for the human mind.

We are prone to focus on the negative because our ancestors had to be vigilant and careful with survival purposes. They had to assume the worst was around the bend because that increased their chances of survival.

The careful hunter-gatherer only stayed a hunter-gatherer for a short time and thus did not pass along their genes.

On the flip side, individuals that were vigilantly focused on the many things that could go wrong were the ones that survived and passed along their genes.

And since we have removed the majority of physical threats from our modern, local environments, our environments are defined by a lack of struggle.

So we subconsciously create obstacles for ourselves.

Most of us don’t realize we are doing this… so instead, we blame people, the world, our coworkers, our parents, our spouses, and so on.

And what we create are excuses for ourselves coupled with external, unsolvable problems.

And the unsolvable part is the real problem that contributes to the mass of suffering modern humans experience.

Examples include:

Worrying about the future

Obsessing over the past

Trying to change other people

Trying to control outcomes of events

Living a life for others

Living in denial of one or more things in life

And so on

Most people focus on things they can’t control, which is as absurd as it sounds yet no less prevalent.

But there’s a better way.

Focus on obstacles you can overcome, then work towards overcoming them.

This is how you use your natural propensity towards struggle in a way that will make the world—and your life—better.

And it all starts by retooling your brain to focus on things within your control—and only those things.

This translates to one thing: yourself.

The only thing you can truly control in life is your actions, thoughts, and beliefs.

I’d say that the only natural way to deal with being a modern human is to learn how to control the problems you face by finding the correct ones while avoiding the wrong ones.

You want to accept the things outside your control while permitting yourself to live on your terms.

If you do this, you can evolve out of the traps that your biology has set for you.

But it’s tough and takes work. Years of work.

Colin Stuckert,

Founder/CEO, Wild Foods