Intentional

 

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, understand what affects us and what effects it has on us and 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 you how to add meaning to your actions and lead a meaningful, happier, more fulfilling life on your terms.

read an excerpt...

 

Whether we realize it or not, we all feel the need for this kind of guidance that gives us a deep sense of purpose. Because we are born physically helpless we have evolved to latch onto and work hard to understand our immediate environment and the people around us. This makes us, as we grow older, intensely pro-social. At the same time it provides us with a ready-made set of expectations, rules and guidelines to guide our behavior that arise from the collective behavior of those around us.

That behavior is the culture we experience and the traditions we abide by. The problem with this is that rather than defining for ourselves what is important to us we accept that which is given to us. That which is given to us is rarely what we want, but it can very easily become what we settle for.

Settling is an evolutionary-programmed trait. Let me explain: Life is hard. It really is. Even if we happen to have the extraordinary luck to be born into a very rich family whose legacy gives us everything we need to live comfortably for the rest of our life, maintaining that fortune and navigating through life is going to be fraught with risks, traps and constant upheavals.

We need other people. Other people need us. That is a truth. But the reasons for this mutual need are usually contradictory or, at the very least, sufficiently at odds with each other to make trust an issue and turn cooperation into a risk-assessment exercise.

about David Amerland...  

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.

 

Email & Social Media Accounts

Reach David via email: davidamerland@gmail.com

Twitter: https://twitter.com/DavidAmerland

Medium: https://davidamerland.medium.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidamerland/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/DavidAmerland/about

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/david_amerland/

Represented by The Knight Agency

For Goodreads Reviews and where to buy the book follow this link: https://bit.ly/3K7L0uj

more personal "stuff" about David...

Does this book have a special meaning to you? i.e. where you found the idea, its symbolism, its meaning, who you dedicated it to, what made you want to write it?

Every book, fiction and non-fiction alike, has a special meaning for the writer. At the end of the day it represents a sizeable chunk of time spent thinking about it, researching it and writing it and by the time it sees the light of day it has had a long journey that’s representative of every form of creative art humans engage in. That in itself gives it value, at least on a personal level.

But there are additional elements. For an act of creation (which is what a book is) to continue, unabated for as long as it takes to bring to fruition the writer needs to be able to focus on it which means it has to have a meaning far greater than just a means to make a living. Obviously, as a writer, I want my books to sell but it is also really important to me to have my books change the reader.

It is the latter that keeps me focused, that challenges me, that makes me seek, each time I write a new book, ways to add more value, push the envelope of our understanding and practices and challenge the traditions that keep us bound to specific behaviors and specific understandings.  

Intentional: How to Live, Love, Work and Play Meaningfully holds a special place in all this, for me. It is my way of adding science-backed evidence to what we normally can’t easily see: our beliefs, our values, our motivation, our priorities, our direction in life, how all these are formed and how they affect our choices, decisions and actions.  

Where do you get your ideas from?

Most writers will tell you the same thing: the ideas or the next book often come while writing the previous one. That’s because research and writing, thinking and reflecting spark off all sorts of tangents and we, writers, end up going down all sorts of rabbit holes. Intentional: How to Live, Love, Work and Play Meaningfully, is no exception to this admittedly broad rule.

The concept came to me while I was still researching and writing The Sniper Mind: Eliminate Fear, Deal With Uncertainty And Make Better Decisions which, at almost double the length of Intentional had to be curtailed so it could profitably go to printing. There was a lot of research I had on my hands which did not quite fit that book and I was coming across even more. The question of a more personal approach to the practical applications of cutting-edge findings from the worlds of neuroscience, social psychology and anthropology was at the back of my mind. When The Sniper Mind was finally out I found that some of the ideas had percolated and Intentional was born. 

Was this book easier or more difficult to write than others?  Why?

Every book is hard to write. Now, here comes the hard part: understanding why. Obviously writing, from a skills point of view, should be easy. You place one word after another in a way that makes them make sense. The first part of this sentence is easy. The second part is not. For things to truly make sense the writer has to encode their ideas in a way that takes account the perceived, needs, understanding and knowledge of its audience.

Intentional, for example, could have been written by a master lexicographer with the help of a master grammarian and, presented to an audience of Mars dwellers, have failed to make them understand anything. That’s because they would have nothing in common with us, maybe not even basic biology and fundamental neurobiology. This means that Intentional, really, is meant for a Terran audience and really only for a subset within that Terran audience who are actively concerned about how to direct their choices and decisions, beliefs, values, thoughts and actions to achieve outcomes that are desirable to themselves and good for the greater social group around them so as to give their life purpose which provides a deeper meaning.

Meaningful action have value. That also raises expectations. To bring everything back down to writing this book then, in order for me to write the best book possible I had to take into account my perception of the needs of my audience, create a mental model that adequately reflects those needs and then use my writing to formulate a solution and present it in a way that it can be read quickly, internalized and applied. So, yeah, while writing the words themselves is child’s play picking each word to write is a bear.   

Do you only write one genre?

In the past I used to write literary short stories for British literary magazines and I have written a couple of pop-fiction books to a specific format because I found myself at the right place and the right time to pick up a contract for them. But my main work is in non-fiction at the moment and my efforts in delivering value to my readers manifest through non-fiction books.

Give us a picture of where you write, where you compose these words…is it Starbucks, a den, a garden…we want to know your inner sanctum?

Well, this is what I need in order to write: a screen and a cup of coffee. I can literary write anywhere using any device. I have written snippets of books on airport waiting lounges and trains. I write wherever my laptop is. I do need access to the internet, not just for research but also because all my work is stored in the cloud and accessed from the device I happen to use. In the past I was a true digital nomad so all my notes, notebooks, books, research papers and studies are digital.

I know that some writers need to be in the mood or have a certain space that is just write for them and from a neuroscientific point of view this makes total sense. The brain needs to ease into a particular mode of working much like we have a ritual in the morning that prepares us for going to work. Because, most of my working life, I had to make do with whatever time I could grab to write, I’ve learnt to just grab hold of a device and write and that totally works for me. 

And finally, of course…was there any specific event or circumstance that made you want to be a writer?

Writing is central to the way I see, understand and relate to the world. I have often asked myself why. The best answer I can come up with is that I grew up surrounded by books. People read to me before I could read and then helped me read better when I first started to read. There was also lack of adult supervision in what I read. As a result my ‘childhood reading’ consisted of adult books. From whodunnits to detective noir fiction to classics like The Devil and Margarita, which I wouldn’t quite understand until I hit puberty, The Volga Boatman, Moby Dick and Nothing New From The Western Front.

In Intentional: How to Live, Love, Work and Play Meaningfully, I cite research that shows a person’s character is more or less determined by their first seven years of existence. I am only guessing here but my exposure to such adult writing at a young age rewired my brain to see the world and understand it in a certain way and to use the written word to grasp its complexities. That, in turn, made writing for me a key way to express myself. It still is. Writing is almost a physical need for me. If a day or two go by and I haven’t written a word anywhere, at all, I find myself becoming irritable. There is a pressure that builds up inside me which I have come to understand as the means through which I work out what’s bugging me and what issues related to work, business, marketing and decision-making I can work through when I write.

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