Akshay Nanavati, Marine Corps Veteran
Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais
Dr. Michael Gervais
4.6 • 1.8K Ratings
🗓️ 5 June 2019
⏱️ 70 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week’s conversation is Akshay Nanavati, a Marine Corps Veteran, endurance athlete, philanthropist and creator of Fearvana.
After overcoming drug addiction, PTSD and depression from fighting the war in Iraq with the US Marines, and alcoholism that pushed him to the brink of suicide, Akshay has since built a global business, run ultramarathons, and explored the most hostile environments on the planet, from mountains to caves to polar icecaps.
Combining his life experience with years of research in neuroscience, psychology and spirituality, he wrote a book called “Fearvana: The Revolutionary Science of How to Turn Fear Into Health, Wealth and Happiness.”
About the book, the Dalai Lama said “Fearvana inspires us to look beyond our own agonizing experiences and find the positive side of our lives.”
He is now on a mission to turn Fearvana into a global movement to help others build a positive relationship with suffering.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | 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. |
| 0:14.5 | 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 |
| 0:20.0 | well-being, you know, is the negative relationship to suffering. |
| 0:22.0 | I mean, we live in a world that |
| 0:23.0 | demonizes fear, stress, anxiety, pain, adversity, any of these words are not |
| 0:26.2 | perceived as positive. So if we can shift that relationship, we can live a better life. A. All right, welcome back or welcome to the finding mastery podcast. |
| 0:37.0 | All right, welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery Podcast. |
| 0:43.5 | I'm Michael Jervay, and by trade and training a sport and performance psychologist, |
| 0:48.0 | as well as the co-founder of Compete to Create, the whole idea behind these conversations, behind this podcast, is to learn from people |
| 0:56.1 | who are on the path of mastery. People have dedicated their life efforts to better understand |
| 1:01.8 | the nuances of their craft. |
| 1:04.0 | And what we're doing in these conversations is the dig |
| 1:07.0 | to understand if we can better identify what they're searching for, |
| 1:10.0 | how they explain that, |
| 1:12.0 | what drives them underneath of that core motive. |
| 1:15.8 | And then we also want to dig to see if we can get a sense of like how do they explain |
| 1:20.6 | 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 of some of these most extraordinary thinkers and doers. |
| 1:31.0 | I am really excited to announce that this year finding mastery is releasing our first |
| 1:36.0 | ever holiday gift guide. Yes. Having spent decades working with and around some of the |
| 1:42.2 | most driven people on the planet, |
| 1:45.2 | I know the high-performer types in your life can be a little tricky to buy for. |
| 1:49.5 | Their standards tend to be really high, they rarely settle. We all know the drill here. And that's why we |
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