Living your life as a Boy Scout could save your life

Today’s edi­tion of “Reflec­tions of a crazy Colom­bian” comes to your cour­tesy of Neil Strauss, best-selling author of The Gameand Emer­gency

Today I received an email from best-selling author Neil Strauss (I am in one of his mail­ing lists), and it reminded me of the Boy’s Scout Motto ‚Be Pre­pared. Neil became a famous best-seller author a few years ago when he wrote a fas­ci­nat­ing expose of the under­ground com­mu­nity of Pick Up Artists (PUA) in LA and the inter­net. Since then, Neil has writ­ten a new book in which he shares the myr­iad of things he decided to learn when he finally under­stood that we live in an uncer­tain, dan­ger­ous and some­what unre­li­able world (and just in case you’re won­der­ing, no, it was not the Global Finan­cial cri­sis, the swine flu cri­sis, or the lat­est Cal­i­for­nia earth­quakes that shook him into action)

Back to the email I received; In his newslet­ter arti­cle, Neil com­plains about the insane shifts in media atti­tude towards his book after the lat­est wave of ‘crises’. Since I found his argu­ment rather com­pelling, I want to share it with you. Rather than try to repeat it in my own words, I am going to be a lazy bum and tran­scribe his email here.

Before you read Neil’s words, I want to pro­vide one last warn­ing: In his email, Neil gen­er­ously pro­vided a link to a fan­tas­tic PDF resource where he debunks the top 10 myths about the best ways to sur­vive a cri­sis. To avoid over­load­ing Neil’s web servers with down­load requests, I have uploaded the PDF file to Google docs, and changed the link that came with the orig­i­nal email to this new one. If you find the PDF use­ful and want to learn more about Neil’s ven­tures, visit him at neilstrauss.com

Diego,

I’ve been want­ing to write this email “rant” for about a month.
But I keep start­ing it, then stop­ping it. It’s hard to get the tone
right with­out show­ing too much frustration:

If I thought doing the media cir­cus for The Game was tough,
dis­cussing Emer­gency has unex­pect­edly been even more of a challenge.

In about half the radio inter­views I’ve done prior to last month,
the host has asked, with some dis­dain, “Pre­pare for what? What do
you think’s going to happen?”

And then, sud­denly, when the swine flu panic hit, those same
peo­ple sud­denly started call­ing and ask­ing if I could do another
inter­view offer­ing their lis­ten­ers sur­vival tips.

Same thing hap­pened after the Cal­i­for­nia earth­quakes last week.

We live in a world that seems to REACT to emer­gen­cies, rather
than PREPARE for them. Lead­ing to a sit­u­a­tion in which the panic
can be more dan­ger­ous than the dis­as­ter itself.

But why not pre­pare ahead of time?

It doesn’t take that much time or money.

There’s a cer­tain peace of mind that comes from know­ing that when
the next inevitable panic seizes hold of peo­ple, not only do you
know what to do, but you have the equip­ment and skills on hand to
take care of your­self and those you love.

That’s one of the rea­sons why I enjoy this list so much and the emails
I’ve received from you. Many of you who’ve read Emer­gency have gone
on not just to learn pre­pared­ness your­self, but to actu­ally take
CERT train­ing and join vol­un­teer res­cue groups to give back to the
community.

And so I thought I would try to give some­thing back with this email,
rather than just vent my frus­tra­tions about the hypocrisy of the
media.

So I pre­pared a list for you of the ten most com­mon myths about
sur­viv­ing ter­ror­ism, fires, earth­quakes, um, shark attacks, and
other emer­gen­cies both likely and unlikely.

Just like the Game, where I learned that many of the so-called
common-sense things I learned about attrac­tion were wrong, in
Emer­gency I learned that much of the wis­dom I learned grow­ing up
about sur­vival was actu­ally wrong.

And, in the right sit­u­a­tion, the wrong sur­vival tip can kill you
(whereas the wrong sarg­ing tip can only humil­i­ate you).

So here is a lit­tle PDF of top ten sur­vival myths, fol­lowed by the
truth. It is ded­i­cated to the woman I saw in the air­port wear­ing an
N95 mask dur­ing the swine flu panic while rub­bing her eyes with her
bare hands.

You can find it here:

https://docs.google.com/gb?export=download&id=F.c7afc073-7763–4907-b89f-44698248d124
(right-click to download)

Enjoy, and if you find it use­ful, pass it on. After all, as you’re
read­ing this, there may be a shark lurk­ing in the bushes out­side,
just wait­ing to attack. Don’t be caught with your guard down.

On a seri­ous note, if you do have any tips to add to it, email
stslimjim [@T] gmail[D0T] com with the head­line LIFESAVER and I’ll add them
to an updated version.

And don’t for­get, learn­ing sur­vival isn’t just about not dying,
it’s also a great adventure.

To Life,
Neil

To learn more about Neil Strauss, visit his web site at neilstrauss.com or browse his list of books at Ama­zon.

To read more inter­est­ing arti­cles by The crazy Colom­bian, visit our rec­om­mended read­ing page at bestof.crazycolombian.com

Tagged as: Advice from the gurus, email, Neil Strauss, survival, survival myths