Boom! This is Books & Biceps #349!

Welcome to our hundreds of new readers this week! We’ve crossed 23,000 sophisticated meatheads! If someone forwarded you this issue of B&B, you can join us right here:

If you’re a new subscriber you’ll love this profile that the New Yorker ran on our Books & Biceps crew.

BOOKS

The Obvious Choice: Timeless Lessons on Success, Profit, and Finding Your Way by Jonathan Goodman

I’ve been friends with Jonathan Goodman for a while now and it’s not just because we’re both bona fide “Jonathans” and we both still collect 80s and 90s baseball cards and we’re both super jacked dads who write – although all those things are definitively true haha.

I actually started following Jon because he was sharing so many awesome ideas about fitness, entrepreneurship and writing that after a while we messaged each other with a classic, “we should probably be best pals?” line and it took.

We’ve since stayed in touch and helped workshop and support each other’s projects, including Jon’s book that just came out: The Obvious Choice: Timeless Lessons on Success, Profit and Finding Your Way.

Unlike most books like in this genre, Jon doesn’t approach the topics from a data-first perspective like he’s preparing a lame Power Point presentation for his future talks. I don’t enjoy those books and you probably don’t either.

Instead, Jon wrote this book from his strength as a storyteller first, then found the stories and examples and data that would fit the main ethos of the project, which is that algorithms change, humans don’t. Sounds simple, but it’s profound and powerful.

After I read the book I had a bunch of questions and Jon was kind enough to do an exclusive Books & Biceps Q&A for us. This is an inspiring and motivating interview. You’re gonna love this one:

ONE

FINKEL: There’s a line you have in the middle of the book that has stuck with me since I read it: “Irrational Obsession Results in Boundless Energy”

I’ve been mulling over what it means to me about writing or swimming or other niche things that I love. What does it mean to you and how should readers interpret it?

GOODMAN: Right now, artificial intelligence is taking away every single easy job, every single easy task. Our work is going to depend on our ability to choose our heart, to deliberately choose what we decide to obsess over, to accept the trade-offs that we actually can’t do that much, and then to leverage technology to augment us and supercharge our abilities to do that thing. 

What I have found is that there’s really only one or two things that my natural attributes and energies point me towards. Those are the things that I can go from good to truly great perhaps even world-class at. 

For me I believe that that’s writing. Long form writing. Books particularly. For whatever weird reason I’m quite happy to drag my ass out of bed at five in the morning in order to write. 

And so when I say Irrational Obsession Results in Boundless Energy, what I’m getting at there is to identify that when your personal internal wiring points you in a very specific direction, you’ve got to run with it.

TWO

In an earlier section titled “Removing Recklessness”, you wrote another line that has changed the way I operate day-to-day. Truly. It made me think about the low ROI stuff that we can easily slide into. The line was, “It has become very easy these days to work hard on the wrong things.”

How did you learn that lesson? Where did it hit home for you?

Perhaps the most important skill right now in a world designed to distract us, where there’s simply too much information, is filtering everything that you hear as good information or good advice. Good information is wonderful, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s good advice for you.

The example in the book is that I was at a conference listening to a woman on stage talking about her amazing business with funnels that funnel into other funnels and then those funnels funnel into other funnels and all of these different other businesses that feed into each other. She doesn’t have family, she doesn’t have kids, she’s still young, she’s got tons of time to do this. Maybe she will. Either way, it’s her choice. 

But looking at the guy sitting next to me at this conference who has three kids under the age of five, I know he’s thinking the same thing as me, which is: “If I’ve got to do all this shit just to make a few bucks, count me out.” 

None of this is downplaying the value of what she was sharing, but it’s not for me. There’s a lot of people out there in our world today that are spouting very strong takes, and they’re not necessarily wrong takes or bad takes. But I think you have to actually go one step farther and say, “Okay, do their personal goals and aspirations match mine? Do their family circumstances match mine? Do they have the type of business that I want to be building?”

And if the answer is yes, right, that’s good advice. If the answer is no, then it might be good information but bad advice. 

BICEPS

If you were making a Venn Diagram of authors Books & Biceps readers would love and you put “ex college QB” on one circle and “Edgar Award Winner” in the other circle, the entire B&B crew would be smack dab in the middle flexing and shouting, “give us the damn books!”

I’m happy to tell you that this dude exists in the form of my buddy Eli Cranor. Eli played at FAU and Ouchita Baptist University and he’s not only written some tremendous books, but he’s got a new one coming out soon that was essentially written directly for us called Mississippi Blue 42, where, and I’m borrowing from my official blurb here, “Cranor blends his lifetime in pigskin with his gift for prose into a book that is a rare treat: a clever work of crime fiction that longtime Elmore Leonard readers and diehard football fans will both love.”

Even better, he’s about to go in full-on book hustle mode, which I respect immensely. For some of us, that means recording Macho Man promos every week until our throats gave out… And for others, with actual athletic talent, it means dotting a garbage can with a football from 50 yards away high up in the stands. Kinda like Dude Perfect meets the English Major.

This is a fun, quick watch:

As you all know by now, pre-orders for books are huge, so go ahead and grab your copy of MISSISSIPPI BLUE 42 now here.

QUICK FLEXES

Every Tuesday I write a new column over at Midlife Male, the fastest-growing lifestyle newsletter for men 40+. I’m the Editor-in-Chief and this week I wrote about something important - going to WrestleMania with your kids:

And in honor of the NFL Draft last night, don’t forget about the time that the Patriots moved UP in the draft in 2018 to take me in the 4th round as their new punter. Lifetime moment right here:

STRONG LINKS

Did you get your ‘Bench O’Clock Monday Morning’ Mug yet?

Bottom line: If you read this most weeks and follow me on social you’ve seen me type the words “Bench O’Clock Monday Morning” about a hundred thousand times. Now, for only $14, you can enjoy the greatest meathead time of the day whenever you want. It’s the official Spring mug of the Books & Biceps crew:

Generation Griffey is still the #1 Sports & Pop Culture book for dudes who grew up in the 80s and 90s… Get your copy!

If you still wear your hat backward like Griffey, think all the Prime flavors are dumb because Gatorade Citrus Cooler is the greatest sports drink ever, miss Blockbuster and Tower Records, destroyed your friends in Street Fighter, GoldenEye, and NBA Jam, can quote Tommy Boy and Billy Madison, and never missed Stu Scott on SportsCenter —this book, Generation Griffey, is for you.

I ranked 90 of the '90s things that made your dude childhood legendary. A rankfest, if you will. Ninety columns. By me. For you. For US.

Why Generation Griffey?

First, it’s a great name. We’ve got alliteration, “generation,” and the quintessential athlete of that era: Ken Griffey Jr.

Junior perfectly defines the era for late '80s and '90s kids because the apex of his career matches our childhood. From the day he joined the Mariners’ lineup in 1989 through the next decade, nobody embodied '90s style (the backward hat), swagger (the swing, the smile, the commercials), and coolness (the kicks, the cameos, the crossover stardom) quite like Griffey.
His reign atop the sports/celebrity pyramid (alongside Jordan) from his rookie year in Seattle to his move to the Reds in 2000 serves as the perfect bookend for all of us who grew up in the last decade of the last century.

See? Generation Griffey is a spectacular name for this book.

What are we ranking?

Everything. Well, noteverything, but the 90 most nostalgic things that make us dudes smile all these years later: the movies we quoted, the athletes we loved, the cards we collected, the foods we devoured, the shows we watched, and more. All of it. Got it? Good. Let’s go.