Jack Torrance

After I talked about my struggles with recording, a lot of you wanted to know about my book coming out in January. It’s called Better Every Day: An Action Plan for a Full Life. When I say action plan, I mean it. Be Useful is my philosophy; Better Every Day is how you put it into practice. This book is a playbook, filled with stories from my life, connected to weekly actions you can add to your life immediately. Like the newsletter, the goal wasn’t just to give you information. It was giving you something to act on. Learning is important, but without action, it doesn’t do much for you. I wrote this book to get you moving forward, one step at a time. Most of the lessons I learned came from the work. Often with a barbell or a dumbbell in my hand. The best way to learn is by doing, and the gym offers a safe laboratory to test those lessons. The gym builds our armor. I don’t just mean physical armor. I mean mental armor. And I want to be very clear. I don’t mean the tough-guy, fake-stoic, doesn’t-feel-anything kind of armor. That’s bullshit. It’s camouflage, not armor. Carl Jung called it the persona. The mask we wear for the world. Everybody needs one sometimes. The trouble starts when you forget it’s a mask and start believing it’s you. The armor we build becomes part of us. The mask never is. Jung said you don’t grow by picturing the light. You grow “by making the darkness conscious.” You don’t get stronger by ignoring your fear, your anger, or your shame. You get stronger by facing them. Then he admitted most people won’t do it, because it’s unpleasant. He was right. It is unpleasant. So is a heavy squat. Real mental toughness is not pretending to be invulnerable. I had to learn to stop hiding from emotions to become truly mentally strong. The iron can teach you these lessons at a lower cost than learning them from life events. You learn that doing hard things won’t kill you. You learn that a failure today doesn’t say anything about what is possible tomorrow. You learn that a setback isn’t an end; it’s a setup for a comeback. You learn that discomfort isn’t something to escape; it’s the path to what you want. You learn to relentlessly chase being better every day. That hunt for self-improvement isn’t about vanity. It’s our nature. We were hunters for hundreds of thousands of years before we could order fast food from our couches. We are born to hunt, and forgetting that is why I believe a lot of people are unhappy. I don’t mean hunting animals — you all know that’s not my style. I mean hunting for anything. Searching. Finding. Your hunt might be learning a language or improving your chess game. Finding a soulmate or starting a business. Getting healthy. That’s why we need armor. It’s easier to put ourselves out there and hunt for more if we feel protected. And there is no cheaper way to start building your armor than in a workout, because hard things are coming for you in life. No matter who you are. We choose to do hard things now so when the real hard stuff hits, it doesn’t feel quite as heavy. It’s why The Pump Club app became much more than I expected. I expected stories about losing weight and getting stronger. I was surprised at how many of you said you transformed mentally. I should have known better. Because that was me, too. The reps I started in the gym under the stadium in Graz six decades ago didn’t just grow my muscles; they grew my mind. I’m at the stage of my life where I want to share everything that’s helped me with as many people as possible. Better Every Day isn’t a fitness book or a workout program. It’s a program for life, laid out one week at a time, so you can build the armor that allows you to live fully. To live more. Pre-order your copy to build your armor: US: penguinrandomhouse.com/books… Canada: indigo.ca/products/better-ev… Outside the US and Canada: lnk.to/BetterEveryDay