the kettlebell as teacher

reveries on Dostoevsky and Goggins

by Claude Monet

Man is a forgetful creature. As long as we live, we learn, but we also quickly forget these lessons. This month has taught me that thirty minutes with a kettlebell is better than reading all the self-help in the world. I have arrived at such a conclusion after spending a lot of time with intellectually stimulating books, only to realize that not everything is an intellectual problem and that sometimes it’s more useful to apply things from more down-to-earth books.

I’m reading Dostoevsky’s “Writer’s Diary” — a very flawed book and I don’t want to get into the details, but I will admit that it also contains the best short story I’ve ever read, which is very timely for this time of the year, called “The Beggar Boy at Christ’s Christmas Tree”. No short story has ever had such an emotional effect on me, so I highly recommend you read it. Reading that book has also taught me that there are gems waiting to be found inside any kind of book and one of these gems was reading his announcement from 1876 about this publication:

Each issue will come out on the last day of the month and will be sold separately in all bookstores for twenty kopecks. But those wishing to subscribe to the whole year’s edition will enjoy a discount and will pay only two rubles (not including delivery and mailing): the cost with mailing and home delivery will be two rubles, fifty kopecks.

If I didn’t know this was written almost 150 years ago, I would’ve thought that he’s starting a Substack. The past is an interesting place, because some things are conceptually the same as what we have in the present, and learning about things like this is my favorite part of reading old books. Issue on the last day of the month, subscribers, yearly discounts… How little has changed since then.

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Now, Dostoevsky is not a light fellow to read, even when one reads his non-fiction. One needs to have a certain stamina for approaching his books, which is why I’ve decided to take a break from all the theorizing and picked up something more practical next. I picked one of these “top 20 books you must read before you die” shared by bookfluencers on your social media of choice. I picked a book that has a banner “over 4 million copies sold” on its cover, which, like “Pulitzer prize winner” should’ve sounded the alarms. But, I wanted to explore a little, so yes, I will confess this, I have decided to read “Can’t Hurt Me” by David Goggins. And, I hate to admit, I’ve found it quite interesting to read. Sure, like most popular non-fiction, it was about ten times longer than necessary, but still, I think it was a worthwhile read.

It was compelling because it’s a classical hero’s journey story about a person who was a failure by any standard and is now probably one of the grittiest people alive. His grit borders on self-harm but he still continues to do it because he wants to conquer his mind. He actively seeks pain because his mind, like everyone’s, likes to avoid it and seeks solace in comfort and pleasure. Instead of his mind being in the driver’s seat, he wants to take the wheel, and make it his servant; suffering is a vehicle for that.

That said, it was interesting to understand how both Goggins and Dostoevsky appreciated suffering because it enriched their lives. Goggins since he is a former Navy SEAL, and Dostoevsky having survived a labor camp and being spared from execution and then continuously suffering epileptic attacks. Still, he persevered and that resulted in production of multiple classics of world literature.

Goggins always seeks more suffering, and I don’t think he will ever find enough of it. I don’t think being dissatisfied with yourself all the time, judging yourself and setting the impossible standards for yourself, and constantly chasing the next thing is a very nice way of living. Over the years, I’ve realized that I most admire people who live wholesome lives.

This is going to sound shabby, but I like people who find pleasure in the little things: slow mornings, good cups of coffee, finding beauty in the mundane. I like people who romanticize their lives in one way or another. Who understand that the path to living well is counting the ways in which they are blessed in the present, since the present is a very temporary thing.

But that doesn’t mean I can’t take something good from his life. I think we like to glorify people and either raise them to the level of gods or quickly dismiss them as idiots as soon as they do something stupid. And I think that worldview lacks nuance because it sees everything as black or white.

There’s this trap of intellectualism and valuing books purely because of their intellectual value while sometimes even the most simple of books can be more beneficial. Charlie Munger said that one should take a simple idea and take it seriously and that neatly transfers to books. There’s this fallacy that one can get more from a book if it’s more complex, like everything that is valuable is complex, but that is not always the case. Sometimes one can get a lot from very simple ideas.

So when I read more practical books like this, I think of Emerson: “Every man I meet is my superior in some way. In that, I learn of him.” I have learnt a lot about perseverance from this book and it has inspired me to take training seriously again so my habit tracking app now reports a training streak of ten days. There’s this trap of overintellectualism where we are compelled to read complicated books because read books are also a signaling device — just like an expensive watch signals that you are wealthy. In this world a complicated book read signals you have a very developed intellect. But sometimes, there is more wisdom in applying simple ideas than in understanding complex ones. Sometimes the teacher comes in the form of a kettlebell and teaches lessons without uttering a single word.

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P.S. As always, thank you, dear reader, for reading my essay. Thank you also for reading all the past essays, I know they are not always the best. Thank you for your emails, they are always delightful. May 2025 be the best year for you.