Interview with Ben Mercer, author of Fringes: Life on the Edge of Professional Rugby
Ben Mercer, author of Fringes: Life on the Edge of Professional Rugby takes the time to provide some top class book recommendations this week! Before jumping into the interview, please check out Ben's book Fringes: Life on the Edge of Professional Rugby:
Review from Amazon:
Sports books tend to detail extraordinary achievements, triumphs against the odds or commemorate World Cup winning captains. This book does not do that. (Prices accurate at time of writing)
Fringes: Life on the Edge of Professional Rugby
For many, playing professional sport is the Dream Job. Few manage it, very few make it to the top and for the rest, life is very different. This is their story. In Fringes, Ben Mercer invites you to witness life at the outer edges of professional rugby.
This is a first hand account of what life is like as a journeyman professional athlete. You play, but to the wider public you don't exist. You earn but you don't drive a flash car. You sometimes pack out a stadium but sometimes, you play in a deserted park. This is the story for the majority of sports professionals. Only the minority taste the top, only one person gets to lift the cup or win the medal, only 15 get to play for England at any one time. For the rest, that’s not the case.
Ben Mercer is a former professional rugby player who after becoming disillusioned and uninspired plying his trade in the English Second Division, accepted an offer out of the blue to go to France and do something different - help an amateur team turn professional. This is a first hand account of what life is like in the lower reaches of professional sport - where your employment status is as precarious as your health and barely anyone will know your name.
Buy On:
Amazon £10.11
Q. Do you have a favourite smart thinking book (and why that book)?
Antifragile has been the biggest influence on how I think. Taleb is both funny and exasperating in style but the way he frames big concepts in counterintuitive ways is magnificent. This one will make you look differently at everything around you.
Review from Book Depository:
Tough times don't last. Tough people do.
(All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing)
Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
In The Black Swan, Taleb showed us that highly improbable and unpredictable events underlie almost everything about our world. Here Taleb stands uncer tainty on its head, making it desirable, even necessary. The antifragile is beyond the resilient or robust. The resil ient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better and better.
Just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension, many things in life benefit from stress, disorder, volatility, and turmoil. What Taleb has identified and calls antifragile are things that not only gain from chaos but need it in order to survive and flourish. Antifragile is a blueprint for living in a Black Swan world. Erudite, witty, and iconoclastic, Taleb's message is revolutionary: the antifragile, and only the antifragile, will make it.
Buy On:
Book Depository €16.31
Waterstones £12.99
The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds
Review from Book Depository: In 1969 two men met on a university campus. Their names were Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. They were different in every way. But they were both obsessed with the human mind - and both happened to be geniuses. Together, they would change the way we see the world.
Buy On:
Book Depository €9.81 Waterstones £9.99(All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing)
Q. What's the most recent smart thinking book you've read (and how would you rate it)?
I recently finished Ultralearning and enjoyed it. It's got some clear and actionable advice on how to learn quickly, efficiently and deeply. It could have included some more detail of the author's own ultralearning exploits but then it would have been a different book.
Review From Book Depository:
Future-proof your career and maximize your competitive advantage by learning the skill necessary to stay relevant, reinvent yourself, and adapt to whatever the workplace throws your way in this essential guide.
(All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing)
Ultralearning: Seven Strategies for Mastering Hard Skills and Getting Ahead
Faced with tumultuous economic times and rapid technological change, staying ahead in your career depends on continual learning-a lifelong mastery of new ideas, subjects, and skills. If you want to accomplish more and stand apart from everyone else, you need to become an ultralearner.
Scott Young incorporates the latest research about the most effective learning methods and the stories of other ultralearners like himself-among them Ben Franklin, Judit Polgar, and Richard Feynman, as well as a host of others, such as little-known modern polymaths like Nigel Richards who won the World Championship of French Scrabble-without knowing French.
Buy On:
Book Depository €12.75
Waterstones £14.99
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
Review From Book Depository:
A powerful argument for how to succeed in any field: develop broad interests and skills while everyone around you is rushing to specialize.
From the '10,000 hours rule' to the power of Tiger parenting, we have been taught that success in any field requires early specialization and many hours of deliberate practice. And, worse, that if you dabble or delay, you'll never catch up with those who got a head start. This is completely wrong.
In this landmark book, David Epstein shows you that the way to succeed is by sampling widely, gaining a breadth of experiences, taking detours, experimenting relentlessly, juggling many interests - in other words, by developing range.
Buy On:
Book Depository €17.44 Waterstones £20.00(All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing)
The Courage to Be Disliked: How to Free Yourself, Change your Life and Achieve Real Happiness
Review From Book Depository:
The Japanese phenomenon that teaches us the simple yet profound lessons required to liberate our real selves and find lasting happiness.
The Courage to be Disliked shows you how to unlock the power within yourself to become your best and truest self, change your future and find lasting happiness. Using the theories of Alfred Adler, one of the three giants of 19th century psychology alongside Freud and Jung, the authors explain how we are all free to determine our own future free of the shackles of past experiences, doubts and the expectations of others. It's a philosophy that's profoundly liberating, allowing us to develop the courage to change, and to ignore the limitations that we and those around us can place on ourselves.
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Book Depository €8.40 Waterstones £8.99(All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing)
Q. Do you have a favourite childhood book?
Reading was my biggest childhood pursuit, at least until I pooled my pocket money with my brother to buy a PlayStation. Even then I read a lot. The books I kept coming back to were the Greek myths, I had an illustrated adaptation of the Iliad which I loved, Calvin and Hobbes and later The Beach by Alex Garland. The myths spoke to my imagination, Watterson was funny and poignant and I'll now follow Garland anywhere.
The Iliad (Illustrated Edition)
Review From Book Depository:
This edition first published in 1899 using Pope's translation and Flaxman's designs, with an introduction and notes by Rev. Theodore Alois Buckley, M.A., F.S.A.
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Book Depository €23.82 Waterstones £20.90(All links earn commission from purchases that help fund this site. Prices accurate at time of writing)
Calvin & Hobbes:Tenth Anniversary Book
Review From Book Depository:
Many moons ago, the magic of Calvin and Hobbes first appeared on the funny pages and the world was introduced to a wondrous pair of friends -- a boy and his tiger, who brought new life to the comics page. To celebrate the tenth anniversary of this distinguished partnership, Bill Watterson prepared this special book, sharing his thoughts on cartooning and creating Calvin and Hobbes, illustrated throughout with favorite black-and-white and color cartoons.
Buy On:
Book Depository €17.69 Waterstones £15.99 Wordery $11.93(All links earn commission from purchases that help fund this site. Prices accurate at time of writing)
The Beach
Review From Book Depository:
Many moons ago, the magic of Calvin and Hobbes first appeared on the funny pages and the world was introduced to a wondrous pair of friends -- a boy and his tiger, who brought new life to the comics page. To celebrate the tenth anniversary of this distinguished partnership, Bill Watterson prepared this special book, sharing his thoughts on cartooning and creating Calvin and Hobbes, illustrated throughout with favorite black-and-white and color cartoons.
Buy On:
Book Depository €12.93 Waterstones £7.99(All links earn commission from purchases that help fund this site. Prices accurate at time of writing)
Q. Do you prefer reading on paper, Kindle or listening to an audiobook?
I love podcasts but don't really do audiobooks. My Kindle is a lifesaver considering I've spent much of my life on buses to rugby matches and staying in mediocre hotels but if I'm reading fiction, I do like to have a real life book in my hand. I wouldn't give up my charity shop copy of The Count of Monte Cristo for anything.
Q. Do you have a favourite bookshop (and why that shop)?
I don't really, having always been quite itinerant. My home town of Bath has 2 lovely bookshops - Topping & Company and Mr B's Emporium - which I pop into from time to time. When I Iived in Sydney there were bookshelves dotted around the place where you could swap books - this led me to finally read A Secret History, writing a message inside the cover to join the other previous readers and taking it back to the shelves once I'd finished. That little experience was everything that reading should be.
Huge thanks to Ben for answering my questions and for such great book recommendations!
Please don't forget to check out his book Fringes: Life on the Edge of Professional Rugby.
Daryl
Image Copyrights: HarperCollins Publishers (Ultralearning), Pan Macmillan (Range), The Courage To Be Disliked (Allen & Unwin), Echo Library (The Iliad), Little, Brown Book Group (Calvin and Hobbs), Penguin Books Ltd (Antifragile, The Undoing Project, The Beach)
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