Akshay Nanavati, Marine Corps Veteran

Akshay Nanavati (0:00)

Fundamentally, I believe the most important skill you need to live a happier and more successful life, whatever success means to you, is to develop a positive relationship to suffering, to struggle, to pain, because you're going to experience it whether you like it or not. And if you can smile on the face of that suffering, you live a better life. So if there's one takeaway is to develop that, and I believe that's the greatest problem that stands in the way of our well-being, is the negative relationship to suffering. I mean, we live in a world that demonizes fear, stress, anxiety, pain, adversity, any of these words are not perceived as positive.

So if we can shift that relationship, we can live a better life.

Michael Gervais (0:40)

Thank All right, welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I'm Michael Gervais, and by trade and training a sport and performance psychologist, as well as the co-founder of Compete to Create. The whole idea behind these conversations, behind this podcast, is to learn from people who are on the path of mastery. People have dedicated their life efforts to better understand the nuances of their craft. And what we're doing in these conversations is to dig, to understand if we can better identify what they're searching for, how they explain that, what drives them underneath of that core motive. And then we also want to dig to see if we can get a sense of like, how do they explain events? How do they understand how they fit in the world? How do they understand the grand scheme of the world? All of that is the psychological framework some of these most extraordinary thinkers and doers.

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Now, this week's conversation is with Akshay Nanavati. He's a Marine Corps veteran, an endurance athlete, philanthropist, and the author of Fearvana.

Akshay has been through it now.

After overcoming drug addiction, then he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps where he served in the Iraqi War. And check this, one of his jobs was to walk in front of vehicles to find improvised explosive devices IEDs. I mean, imagine that. And then after he was done serving, he was later diagnosed with PTSD and depression, and he also battled with alcoholism. And in his words, it got so bad that it drove him to the brink of suicide.