The last few weeks have been hard. My dad died. My world has been rearranged a good bit, or at least a new type of reality has set in. Honestly, I had been expecting this day since my boyhood; that I would get a call saying my dad had died in some car accident or fallen down or something similar. He was an alcoholic, and finished his days in a pretty sad state.

I share some stuff about my dad's death, and use this episode as a catalyst for the one thing that has been coming to mind over the last many days: We need to fight! We need to get serious about battling our addictions, be they large or small, serious or subtle. Men aren't given an example of what fighting looks like and like so many other areas in life we try for the easy path and hope for a marginal victory. So often we don't understand when we are pinned down and our only hope is to bolt from the trenches.

If I could suggest to you all, one book to read this year on success, it would be Eric Barker's excellent book Barking Up the Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong. This is a great book and I am really honored to speak to Eric Barker on this subject. He is an outstanding guest on the podcast and you guys are going to get a lot from this conversation!