The Blog of Duncan Graham

Q: You have the opportunity to buy five apartments (or condos) around the world— cost isn’t an issue. Where would you live?

This is a mental game I used to (and still do) play with myself and friends. My strategy is to try to pick places I haven’t necessarily been, but would give me hubs at all corners of the world.

My list changes all of the time, but here is is now

1. Vancouver*

2. Florence (if not here somewhere in Bavaria— Bad Reichenhall maybe)

3. Buenos Aires, Argentina*

4. Either New York or Boston (Dad wants to go to Martha’s Vineyard, which may replace this one)

5. Ko Thao, Thailand*

*Haven’t been yet, but its on my list

So where are your five apartments?

“We are superhuman. Not because we biked 4000 miles or just ran 15 but because we know it is all mental.”

-Peter Krause

Step One: Realize that there is no time but now. the past is a memory and the future is a fantasy. Both only exist in your mind. 

This lesson came to me (at first) from the book Lone Survivor by Marcus Luttrell. Since then I cannot count the times its been demonstrated in my own life.

I see some people —including myself— giving up at times primarily because they can’t get their minds off of the future. There is a moment at which they think, “I can’t do this for another week/month/year”. So they crash. The situation itself doesn’t cause the crash though; its the mind game that does it.

Most of the time, the situation really isn’t that bad at all! Next time you are on a run (or hit some other sort of wall in your life), and you begin thinking, “I can’t go another mile,” stop thinking about that other mile and bring yourself to the present. You’ll find that you aren’t hurting as badly as you thought and may be able to go much farther than you had anticipated. 

Step Two: The only thing you have control of is yourself. Take complete control and be mindful of your thoughts.

You choose how you feel 24/7, though many people run on autopilot. The day you can take control of your emotions and thoughts and mold them to fit your goals is the day you start living.

This goes along with a lesson I learned when I was younger— maybe 8 years old. Something had happened in my life to make me angry, and I believed that the situation itself was the cause of my anger. However, a teacher told me that the situation had very little to do with how I felt and that I was the one responsible for my anger. All I had to do was choose to be happy, and I would be. This lesson took many years to sink in though and I still fight it regularly.

Once you can couple these two practices you can do most anything. By acknowledging that everything we feel is based off of our own perceptions, and that these perceptions are malleable, one can achieve incredible things.