Every time I move I gift most of my books to people. As I’ve done this I’ve been spending a lot of time reading the books I haven’t got to.
Someone gifted me Peter Attia’s book Outlive last year. I’d been hearing specifically about the final chapter of this book for a while, and after he mentioned it in a podcast with Tim Ferriss, I knew I had to read it:
I’ll tell you something funny. When I had an early draft of the book, I shared it with a mutual friend of ours, Hugh Jackman, and Hugh read it, and his only feedback was that should be the first chapter. And Hugh had a really solid argument for why that was the case. The publisher absolutely said, “No chance in hell.” And so it was either nowhere or at the very end of the book.
I think for some people it might be the most important chapter in the book. And I think for others it might be irrelevant. But that was a risk I think that was worth taking.
I haven’t read the rest of the book so I can’t say if it’s worth reading in full but did want to share a few passages from the end.
The chapter is about Peter’s struggles with workaholism and perfectionism. He shares a painful period of his life where he is in NYC while his son has a near-death experience and doesn’t return home, because of work, for ten days.
Reflecting, he says, “Even today, just thinking about what happened, I feel nauseous about my behavior. I can’t believe I did that to my family. I can’t believe what a blind, selfish, checked-out husband and father I was. And I know I may never fully forgive myself for it, as long as I live.”
It’s brutal reading this. I am frustrated with Peter but also have compassion for him. He is so hard on himself and in an age of performative struggle and suffering, Peter doesn’t hide behind a fancy story. He lays it out in a way that feels true and real.
He goes much deeper into some awful childhood experiences that gave him an extreme amount of shame. As an adult, he ran from that shame by chasing what he calls “grandiosity.” He pursued excellence and perfection. But there were hidden downsides: “What’s devilish about flipping from shame into grandiosity like this is that it works. It makes you feel better in the short run, but it just creates havoc in your life in the long run.”
I resonate with this kind of approach to life “working.” In Good Work, I wrote about how painful it was to let go of my previous life strategy:
Letting go of a life strategy that seems to be working can be terrifying. For me, it meant stepping away from a formula for life that provided me with money, status, and real confidence.
Peter shares a comment from one of his patients, a “well-known person” who shares: “I need to be great…in order to feel like I’m not worthless.”
Damn.
At the end of the chapter, he says, “If I can change, you can change” and I’m left feeling inspired. It’s a powerful sentiment because it comes after he just let it rip, sharing the most vulnerable truth with the world. I suspect that personal transformation rarely results from a better how-to framework of best practices and instead comes after being inspired by moving personal stories.
Peter makes the case that to optimize our health (the point of the book), we need to pay more attention to emotional health. He points out, I think rightly, that “mental health and emotional health are not the same thing.” This is a good distinction. Through the lens of “mental health,” we see every challenge as a disease that can be diagnosed and problems to be fixed. But emotional health is something we all deal with every day. As I’ve found on this path, the more attuned I am to my emotional health, the more able I am to be resilient, flow through my days, and do the work that matters to me.
Update: I’ve since read the whole book. Good ending, a little too long otherwise.