I Am Animal: Lessons from Sharks to Master the Mind, Body, and Life

By Bruce Chapman

There are hundreds of reasons that sharks have ruled our world's oceans since their entry into the fossil record 450 million years ago… and why they've survived five mass extinction events, long predating Mount Everest, dinosaurs, and even trees. To me, the message is one and clear: they're really, really, really good at what they do. If that's true, I only have one question. What do these waterborne warriors have to teach humanity about living our dream lives? 

In this book, you'll learn:

—How to master your body, unleashing its power like the biggest great whites in South Africa

—How to set goals with the laser strategy of the blue shark, master survivalist of the open ocean

—What the ancients believed about sharks all over the world

—How to choose your animal guides and get up close and personal

The more that I look at the world of sharks, the more I learn that these things aren't just the beautiful native citizens of Earth that researchers and documentary junkies might think. They're also quite literally made to teach us how to live the life of our dreams. If we just learn how to listen to them, we might see just how good they are at that too.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bruce Chapman
• Release date: Sep 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201941758

Book preview

Setting Goals: A Great White Strategy to Hunting Down Your Best Self

It’s a well-known fact that a great white shark’s favourite food is a seal. Its thick layers of blubber pack it with much-needed calories. So when 60,000 cape fur seals gather to wean their pups on the aptly named Seal Island, you can be sure it catches some attention.

Big seals, however, can be hard to catch... and they fight back. Adult seals are agile, easily able to swim circles around a shark and injure it. The sharks find the small, naïve pups much easier to catch, and so they wait till the pups eventually have to go it alone.

These sharks hunt the way all great whites do: ambush from below. Their countershading makes them practically invisible from the surface, and their vision is ten times greater than that of humans in low light, allowing them to easily spot the silhouette of prey against the surface. Once the powerful muscles of a great white’s tail pump, there’s no going back. Its entire body surges toward its prey like a toothy torpedo, catapulting it and the shocked, terrified seal out of the water.

Scientists have long wondered whether these hunts were simply random, raw muscle, or something more. Researchers Greg Skomal of the Massachusetts Marine Fisheries and Neil Hammerschlag of the University of Miami took an unusual step. They teamed up with criminologists to apply FBI profiling techniques normally used on serial killers.

When the team plotted some 340 great white attacks near Seal Island, a pattern emerged. Of all the sharks to hunt near Seal Island, the biggest ones focused their efforts within a strict, clearly defined boundary where the prey was most abundant. The increased success made them bigger, which in turn increased their success even more. The team estimated that while the smaller sharks hunting elsewhere in the area succeeded 45% of the time, success rates for the bigger sharks within these boundaries almost doubled that at over 70%.

This is why your first lesson in becoming a shark is to know your target, carve out a laser strategy, and stick to it. As true as it is that it works for some hunters to venture into the wild, weapons in tow, the greatest success is usually reserved for those who have a clear picture of their prey, and how to catch it. This is the importance of setting goals.

A powerful instrument that will enable you to get a general feel for your quality of life, laying the foundation for goal setting, is a visual tool called the wheel of life. A wheel of life is a pie chart with equal sections dedicated to each part of your life that is important to you. Each section is ranked on any of ten or so radial rungs, based on how well you feel you are performing.

Chart, pie chart Description automatically generated

Figure 1a, courtesy of https://goal-life.com/en/tool/wheel_life

Shown in Figure 1a is an online tool that will enable you to calculate and even download a picture of your Wheel of Life. Since learning about this tool from my mentors in the last weeks of 2021, I have committed to creating a snapshot of my life every six months to see where I’m at with my short-term and long-term goals. See Figure 1b for a look at where I started, on November 29,