A Review of “Gorilla Mindset” by Mike Cernovich

Gorilla Mindset is Mike Cernovich’s latest foray into prose, a how-to workbook on how to get out of your rut, unleash the animal inside, and start living the life you were meant to live.

So what sets this book apart from all the other entries in Walmart’s self-help bargain bin?  I can boil it down to three points.

First, the author himself.  Mike Cernovich didn’t come from a privileged background, he didn’t have an easy life, and by all rights he should have wound up on skid row, as just another overweight, welfare-sucking, degenerate (all of which he covers in the introduction; I don’t wanna hear no excuses about how tough you’ve had it).  Instead he’s a successful writer (through his practical and well-researched website Fit Juicing – not through teaching “Meditation Retreats” at $500 a pop, or any other sort of Jimmy-Jim-Jim-Johnson bullshit), living where he wants, doing what he wants, with a beautiful woman at his side, and he’s built like a Buick before the gas shortages hit.  Bootstraps, and the lifting-up-thereby, are topics he knows a thing or two about.

Second, the content of the book is well researched.  Brian Griffin wrote Wish It, Want It, Do It in three hours, pumping his readers full of narcissistic supply and little else; contrast to Cernovich, who devoted the time to reading the peer reviewed research on the topics he covers, understanding the different practices and personally experimenting with them, and interviewing multiple experts (such as Dr. Brett Osborne, a Board-Certified Neurosurgeon, and Dr. Jeremy Nicholson, a Social and Personality Psychologist).  In other words, he put in the elbow grease.

Third – and this is the part that really stands out to me – is that he designed Gorilla Mindset to be a workbook.  It’s something that you, the reader, need to return to, and continuously implement.  It’s not a one-time fix; it’s not a band-aid solution; it’s a “program” of sorts that demands you spend the same sort of time and discipline on living your life successfully, as you would on a new workout program, a business, or any other endeavour.

One of the parts that struck me as particularly profound was “Imagining Your Perfect Day”; because when you actually go and write it all down – actually delineate what your perfect day would entail, what you’d actually be doing while the sun was up – you wind up with something that’s incredibly productive, and yet (at least in my case) looks very different from “What I Ought to be Doing Today”.

How many people do you know who are doing what they “Ought” to be doing, and yet they’re utterly miserable?  They lease a car to go to a job to make payments on the car, they stress themselves out adhering to a schedule of what the “ought” to do, and wind up stressing themselves out to the point where they procrastinate, binge, or crash – and now they have to work even harder because they’re behind schedule.

Where’d that schedule come from? “It’s what I ought to be doing.” What do you want to be doing? “Huh?”

For a strategic comparison, consider the Iraq War.  At great cost of material and lives, it was fought very effectively for a decade… only to wind up radicalizing and destabilizing the entire Middle East.  It was entered into without clearly delineated victory conditions , and without victory conditions you can’t tell if you’ve won.  Similarly, if you’re just living the way you’re supposed to be living – when exactly will you stop living like that, and start living how you want?

We’ve all heard the story of the retiree who’s bored silly a month after retirement.  He slaved away at a job he hated for decades, only to earn a mind-numbing and boring retirement.  That right there is a man who never planned out his perfect day; who never asked what he truly wanted out of life, and instead he just did what he was supposed to… and that was back when the economy was stable.  These days if you live your life mindlessly, you’re more likely to wind up working as a barista part-time and sending snarky comments to guys like me on Twitter.

Gorilla Mindset demands that you live your life mindfully, and provides the exercises to help you focus on what exactly it is you want to do with your life, as well as expert health, fitness, and posture advice.  New Years Eve is approaching, with its requisite Resolutions – if you’re interested in making a permanent change in your life, and not just the short-term oxytocin boost of a one-month gym membership, Gorilla Mindset is the book that will help you do that.

Mike Cernovich blogs at DangerAndPlay.com
Gorilla Mindset is available through Amazon.