Book Review-Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are

I awaited the publication date of this book with great anticipation, I even pre-ordered it. I thoroughly enjoyed John Kaag’s previous book, American Philosophy: A Love Story. What drew me in was that it was a fantastic blend of the American philosophical history that I was unaware of, a very nice love story, and a story of self-discovery. It was a brave and honest narrative of Kaag’s adventures in rediscovering some American philosophers. His rediscovery was my discovery.

This book, even though the author sees it as a continuation of his self-discovery and honest revelations, was different to me. He has moved the emphasis to Europe, a more familiar philosophical ground but his focus was on Nietzsche, a profoundly difficult and intimidating writer and thinker. It takes a lot of attention from the reader to be prepared for the kind of mental gymnastics that Nietzsche presents.

This book also allows us to look at the inner turmoil within the author, his relationship with his father, his emotional fragility when he was much younger and the pilgrimage he took as a young man to the very same places he is revisiting as an older man and presumably a man who is more able to deal with the emotions and thoughts that had tortured him as a young man. I sometimes felt like a voyeur peeking into places I really should not peek into while I read the book.

The reading did not begin auspiciously, I was quite often distracted and the narrative did not grab hold of my attention as I thought it would. I struggled with the whole imposing reputation and darkness of vision that is attributed to Nietzsche. While the oscillation between Kaag’s remembrances of his past journey and his present journey served as good juxtaposition for the advancement of his story, it made my mind fatigued. I took a very long and circuitous route; I laid the book down often and I ignored it for a number of months.

I started the book while it was late Autumn, as the dark of Winter started to envelope us. The weather reflected Nietzsche’s visions, which made it difficult to mentally absorb the words. I finished the book in late April, my perspective became more enlightened and my mental state became less dark and the messages from the book became more absorbed as I made my way through it. It may also be that the initial chapters of the book reflected the dark weather, which I allowed to affect my mental moods.

In the end, I loved the book, I will be re-reading it later, in sequence with Kaag’s earlier book so that I may pursue his thought process completely.  It wasn’t just the change in weather that turned it, it was also the author’s patient and expert explanation and interpretation of Nietzsche’s ideas, his erudite unraveling of the complicated original writing and the inclusion of many other stories, those of his family and of other historical characters that ably illustrated his points and served as supporting narratives to the main ones.

The author’s inclusion of Hesse in the last portion of the book was particularly welcomed to me as I adored Hesse’s books as a young man. Explaining Nietzsche through the conduit of Hesse’ writing was meaningful to me personally and I believe that Hesse had the foresight and story telling ability to interpret Nietzsche without diminishing the impact of Nietzsche’s thoughts.

This last part of the book made clear the intent of the author’s thesis, and the second part of the book title: On Becoming Who You Are. It was inspiring and enlightening to get to the unifying thought which binds the philosophy to the narrative. The author did a magnificent job of tying up his thoughts about Nietzsche, his own life, and Nietzsche’s philosophy, it made the difficult journey worthwhile for me, even though I suspect I made the journey difficult on my own. But no matter, I understood the point and enjoyed the book in the end.

Volleyball Coaching Life-Focus

Coaches are big on focus. Parents are REALLY big on focus. In fact:” Focus!” is one of the most often repeated mantras heard in gyms and convention centers across the country where volleyball is played. It is right up there with: “Point!”, “Move your feet!”, “Balls up”, and “Water!”.

The question is: do we really know what we mean by focus? Do the players? What specifically are we asking for from the players and most importantly, can they deliver on the promise of focus on demand as if we were asking for a movie on Netflix?

Finally, is focus what we really want from the players? Or are we confusing focus with what we really want from the players?

Jean Fournier and Damian Farrow talk about focus in Chapter 3 Focus: What Are You Thinking about? of their very interesting book titled:   7 Things We Don’t Know, _[1]

First, they define focus as an “engagement in perception, thoughts, or movements”. In more simple terms, “the focus of attention represents what we are thinking about.”

Next, they separate the concept of focus by looking at it in two ways: inward attention (internal focus) and external attention (external focus). Internal focus means that the athlete is keying on their own inner process, on how they perform through their physical action and the performance of technical skills, i.e. on what they needed to do with their own bodies. The external focus in the opposite, where the players are keying on the external results, on what their intent or purpose is with respect to the game itself, on the result, whether it is passing the ball to target or attacking the ball.

According to Fournier and Farrow, the external focus is more beneficial for performance than internal focus, in fact internal focus tends to distract the player from performing the tasks necessary to play the game because they are paying more attention to HOW they are playing rather than playing. This is in seeming contradiction to what we are being taught, that we need to teach our players to focus on the process, be internally focused and be thoughtful about the process. There is a caveat here, and it has to do with the intent of the activity, whether we wish to learn HOW to play the game or to COMPETE in the game. The internal focus is best for the skill acquisition stage of learning and the external focus is best for the competition stage.

Looking in hindsight at my coaching experience, I can see glimmers of Fournier and Farrow’s contentions in how my players have responded to the exhortations to focus. Could my emphasis on focus on skills early on in my coaching been a hinderance to their progress as competitors? Could my emphasis on result oriented situational practices have been a positive boost to how they respond to real game situations? I can’t say for sure because I have not specifically measured the effects, but this idea will now affect how I conduct practices and how I communicate with my players. Fournier and Farrow’s chapter also gives great advice on how to train players to focus their attention and how sports psychologists go about thinking about which data to take when talking about focus.

But, going back to the initial conjecture: is focus what we really mean when we exhort our players? Or are we collectively confusing focus with what we really want from the players?

I believe it is the latter. Being focused does not necessarily automatically infer that the player is performing effectively and flawlessly, being focused is a pre-requisite for performance, it is a first step, it is the initiation of our cognition towards a specific goal, a prelude to a much larger and more complex undertaking: playing the game.

What coaches and parents are meaning to say is: be completely engaged, be in the flow in the Csikszentmihalyi sense, be wu-wei. But we always conflate engagement and being in the flow with just focus. Even though focus, especially external focus, is critical to attaining flow, it is not a guarantee that flow happens automatically. In logical terms, if there is flow like engagement, there must be focus, but having focus does not necessarily mean that there is flow like engagement.

Focus is a necessary condition for flow, but we as coaches must not treat it as an end point or as a goal by itself, it is just a beginning of the cognitive process towards being completely and unconsciously engaged in the play. Of course, for those that coach the young one, achieving external focus is a feat worth celebrating.

[1] Jean Fournier and Damian Farrow, 7 Things We Don’t Know! Coaching Challenges in Sports Psychology and Skill Acquisition. (Canada: Mindeval Canada, Inc., 2013). 37-46.