When I finished at UCLA and began playing professional baseball, I immediately felt like something was missing…
I had a ton of success on the field, but I was dealing with a bit of an emptiness that I hadn’t experienced before.
Once I hit the off-season, I went back home and immediately began digging into mental performance books that I felt could potentially help maximize my potential as a ball player.
I started with a slew of Martial Arts books that my Dad gave me, including The Tao of Jeet Kune Do by Bruce Lee, A Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi and The Art of War by Sun Tzu…
The Mental Game of Baseball by Karl Kuehl and Harvey Dorfman as well as Heads Up Baseball by Ken Ravizza were both stacked next to my bed and served as my baseball Bibles…
All of a sudden, that emptiness went away and was replaced with a beautiful satiated sense of being…
Why? 🤷♂️
The beast had been fed…
Beast???
Yup, not just any beast either… I am talking about the BEAST that controls EVERYTHING we think, say and do in life… The almighty BRAIN. 🧠
While playing baseball, I was a slave to routine and meeting the physical demands of a 162 game season. I would read the USA Today most mornings and would knock out some crossword puzzles, but for the most part, baseball was such a mental mind f*ck that I avoided anything that would really challenge my mental capacity.
Yet, what I learned was just as we train our physical bodies, it is imperative we train our minds. If we don’t, just as our bodies will become weak, so will our medulla oblongatas…
The bottom line is that In order to survive and thrive, our brains need FUEL.
What sort of gas or charge you want to give the noggin is up to you, but new information that challenges the intellect is imperative to keep the golden dome sharp & shiny.
I get it… You don’t have time to read, right???
STFU and save that bullshit…
We all have jobs to do, families to attend to and workouts to slaughter… Yet, recreational creative thought provoking reading that will improve us in every arena of life can be accomplished early in the morning, late at night or as I like to do, right smack dab in the middle of training sessions.
What better time to feed the beast than when we just so happen to be feeding the body???
For the past 8 years, I have been an executioner of audio books and my noodle hasn’t gone hungry since…
Let’s all just make sure we keep the BEAST full…
Trust me, this bitch doesn’t like going hungry. 😋
-EB