Dear Reader, Love Author: 💌 Dear Reader, Love David Amerland

Dear Reader,

Authors hate talking about their books. It’s because we feel vulnerable. A book is a marathon. It consists of many working parts. From start to finish it takes years to complete and along the way it morphs a little from the original. As authors we feel that our job is done the moment the last page has been written.

It’s wrong, I know. It is understandable because it is human but it results in a sense of dissociation. We want our work to speak for itself and each book to speak for us. Yet, a book and its author are an inseparable whole. I often ask myself would Frankestein have been written had not Mt Tambora in Indonesia erupted in 1815? The cold chill and gloomy days it cast across Europe as it spewed its volcanic ash, kept 19-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Percy Shelley and Lord Byron cooped up inside which led to their now famous writer’s challenge.

Or, would King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra have ever existed had not the 1606 plague in England closed all theaters and put all actors out of work, amongst them one William Shakespeare? Would Harry Potter have ever see the light of day if a train between Manchester and London had not been delayed and allowed J. K. Rowling time to flesh out a daydream?

So, now you see a book is as much a product of its time and place as its author. Which means I can’t hide behind my fear no matter how much I may want to. Intentional: How to Live, Love, Work and Play Meaningfully had its roots in the research and writing of another book called The Sniper Mind where I spent some 10,000 hours pouring over neuroscientific research on the decision-making process of the brain and some 300 interview hours talking to retired and serving snipers and neuroscience researchers about their work.

In the midst of all that research came the idea that if we could better understand the modular elements that create our sense of identity, motivation and ambition and have a clearer grasp of how our ideas, beliefs and attitude form we would then be able to better direct our lives.

In the face of uncertainty of the future and ambiguity over the present the only protection that is afforded us is a strong sense of control of our self and our situation. Intentional is, really about that. It is about better self-control, better emotional regulation, clearer thinking and better decisions. In every situation we face in our life we encounter elements which we cannot control. Yet in every situation we are capable of controlling our reaction to what we experience and the way we process it.

It is this reaction and how we deal with it that is, ultimately, the ‘secret’ to acquiring the control we crave over our life. The magic of the book is that everything in us starts small. The fears we feel. The uncertainty we experience. The personal failings we accumulate. The confidence we lose. Left untouched, all these small things erode our ability to function as we want and to compensate, to keep ourselves ‘safe’ from further failure and further emotional pain, we learn to accept things and have our life dictated to us by circumstances.

Yet, these small moments of our life, taken together, become our life. If we could reverse each moment’s failure to success; small wins experienced from day to day, we could then change the way we approach the world and change the way we think about what we want to do and how we want to do it.

In writing Intentional I drew from neuroscience and social psychology, anthropology and forensic paleontology and, sometimes, from physics and thermodynamics to break down complex subjects into first principles. And from there examine what easy, simple things we each can do to become not just better versions of our self but successful better versions of our self.

From the time the book was conceived to the time it came out our world has undergone a global pandemic that destroyed sections of our economies, locked us into our homes everywhere, killed a great many of us and succeeded in breaking the cohesion of the social ties that had kept us all together in a semblance of sanity and order.

If it now feels that we don’t really know how to behave it’s because we have forgotten it a little bit. It also means that at least some of our behavior was the result of our external environment. Our work, colleagues, friends, family, society, country demanded that we be something they expected of us and we, usually, complied.

Intentional is how to be yourself. Not as a selfish, ego-centric individual but as a person who is aware of who they are, what they want and the impact of their every decision and action. In many ways Intentional, unintentionally, became a manual on how to be after the pandemic.

Lofty, right? You can see now why I feel vulnerable just thinking it, let alone publicly saying it. Yet, that is what it is intended to do and, I feel that the time for us to learn how to do it, is now. Intentional makes it easy to do so.

David Amerland is a Chemical Engineer with an MSc. in quantum dynamics in laminar flow processes. He converted his knowledge of science and understanding of mathematics into a business writing career that’s helped him demystify, for his readers, the complexity of subjects such as search engine optimization (SEO), search marketing, social media, decision-making, communication and personal development. The diversity of the subjects is held together by the underlying fundamental of human behavior and the way this is expressed online and offline. Intentional: How to Live, Love, Work and Play Meaningfully is the latest addition to a thread that explores what to do in order to thrive. A lifelong martial arts practitioner, David Amerland is found punching and kicking sparring dummies and punch bags when he’s not behind his keyboard.

For More Information

Visit David Amerland’s website.
Connect with David on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.
Watch David talk about his book at YouTube.
Pick up your copy of Intentional: How to Live, Love, Work and Play Meaningfully at Amazon or Bookshop.org.

Live your life the way you want to. Manage stress better. Be more resilient and enjoy meaningful relationships and better health. We all want that. Such life leads to better choices, better jobs, loving romantic partners, more rewarding careers and decisions that are fully aligned with our aims.

What stops us from getting all that is the complexity of our brain and the complicated way in which the external world comes together. The misalignment between the internal states we experience and the external circumstances we encounter often leads to confusion, a lack of clarity in our thinking and actions that are not consistent with our professed values.

Intentional is a gameplan. It helps us connect the pieces of our mind to the pieces of our life. It shows us how to map what we feel to what has caused those feelings. It helps us understand what affects us and what effects it has on us. It makes it possible for us to determine what we want, why we want it and what we need to do to get it.

When we know what to do, we know how to behave. When we know how to behave we know how to act. When we know how to act, we know how to live. Our actions, each day, become our lives. Drawn from the latest research from the fields of neuroscience, behavioral and social psychology and evolutionary anthropology, Intentional shows how to add meaning to our actions and lead a meaningful, happier, more fulfilling life on our terms.