Glyn Taylor

Hello, I’m Glyn 🫡.

Ok, so firstly… ALIVE!?

Apparently, there is a 20% chance you will think it is a religious thing. It’s not. But if that is why you are here then don’t you dare run away. Thank you 🙂.

I chose this title because when it is stylised in all caps it perfectly signifies everything I am doing here.

I began the journey here by writing about how we can extend our lifespan. What I found, was that the best way to extend our life is by increasing our will to want to. And with that, I found that with the will to live longer, we also live wider:

We enjoy our days more. We have more experiences. We achieve more. And we do all of this without any additional pain. Everything becomes better. We feel the beauty in the world; we feel highly invigorated and an urgency to live.

Living a bigger life can be achieved by both length and width.

And that is the reason for the word “alive” being transformed into its full width version, “ALIVE”.

So, let me explain to you my journey here.

The Origin

The original origin was in 2015, when I started writing a guide titled, “The Anti-Aging Guide: What Really Works”: A simple explanation of what we can do that is known to slow down the aging process. I was doing this because I have a blog called That’s Really Possible (thatsreallypossible.com ), where among other things, I talk about the possibility we will one day learn how to extend longevity.

That writing process was interrupted when I came to the unfortunate point in my life when I discovered that my “purpose”, my life goals, and everything I had been working on since I was 13 years old, was no longer something that I believed in, and something I no longer wanted to pursue.

What I thought of as my purpose in life, was formed when I watched the Twin Towers fall. I decided that I wanted to focus on preventing things like that from ever happening again. I wanted to be at the forefront, looking out at the threats that were forming, and be in a position to be able to contribute to countering them. This led me to a career in the intelligence industry.

The reason I no longer felt motivation to follow that path has a lot to do with politics. So, let’s not go there. The rest of the reasoning, I’ll speak about it my book series.

Lost Years

This had on me, the same effect you hear about when an athlete retires from their sport: Simply being left with the question, “what now?”. When you work so intensely for something your whole life, and then all of a sudden, it’s gone, you are left in a whole new world, and you have no idea what to do next, because you no longer have major signposts, and intense motivation to follow them.

For the first time I experienced what it was like to have no motivation, to be lost. Everything I was working on all of a sudden felt pointless. For the first time I fell into procrastination. I felt time was racing by me, and I couldn’t jump on for the ride. I developed general anxiety. I no longer found enjoyment doing all of the things that I usually did. Everything all of a sudden felt like really hard work, driving in traffic, shopping for groceries, going to the gym, keeping tidy, getting out of bed, brushing my teeth, everything was just a chore.

And then came 2020. I had plans to go travelling, to “find myself” and hopefully snap out of my slump. But we know why those plans didn’t work out. The pandemic came at the worst possible time, and left me stuck by myself, with no goals, with no idea what to do, and no motivation to do the few things I knew I should do.

Lockdowns ramped up that feeling of being lost, many times over.

Before this experience, I didn’t understand how people could lack motivation, how they could be ‘lazy’, how they could sit around all day every day, wasting all their money on junk. I thought surely they could just choose a passion and follow it towards a career path.

Becoming lost and disillusioned with the world is our destiny if we lack purpose and do not understand the things I learnt while writing this book.

The Down

My lowest point in that time, I remember vividly. I was out riding my bike in a big park around the mountain bike trails. It was getting dark, and it was time to go home. But I didn’t want to go home. I just didn’t see the point. I leant against a tree in the woods, my mind completely blank, stuck in the feeling of not wanting to go home, but having nothing else I wanted to do either. I remember my chest feeling really heavy, like it took all my concentration just to breathe. I remember my brain feeling like it was burning, not like the usual headache, but like it wanted to escape my head. I was just frozen. It got dark, and after an hour I only snapped out of it because I got too cold and hungry.

As lows go, I was lucky. People unfortunately get much lower.

And that is exactly what I was thinking about as I began to head home.

Whatever feeling was lower than that, I knew that I must never find out.

If I never knew what it was like to have a very strong sense of purpose in the first place, I wouldn’t have understood how much better life can be when we have it. So my time heading in my original direction in life, thankfully wasn’t wasted.

With no understanding of what was possible, I may have just found a way to settle. I may have sunk into harmful addictions just because I had no understanding of how to get those hits from the real world.

The Up

My aim ever since then has been to keep moving further away from that tree. I know that should I ever again begin to digress in life, the direction I go will lead me right back there.

The only option is to move away from it.

But where to?

I had no idea.

I just knew I had to discover a way to feel that same wild passion for life, but with a completely new mindset.

At first, it just felt like moving for the hell of it.

I thought as long as I was focused on doing ‘something’, at least I wasn’t frozen again. I wasn’t used to just moving aimlessly, it still all just felt pointless. Then though, I discovered that if you are determined to keep moving, you naturally begin to think about how you can move better. Whatever you are deciding to focus on, you begin thinking about how to make that thing better. As long as you keep moving, these ideas for progress keep appearing. All of a sudden, you develop passions. You get into a stride of making something better, and so you become connected to it.

Little by little I started to feel connected to life again. This wasn’t because the things I was doing were serving what I thought of as my purpose. My perspective had changed. I was connected to things merely for what they were, and the potential they had outside of only serving a singular purpose.

With that connection to life gradually restoring, I began to feel motivated again. Working hard on something began to feel like fun, instead of just a torture needed to survive.

With my motivation to work hard restored, I was able to gain the energy to do things that didn’t feel so fun, but I knew would be beneficial.

How the Books Were Born

One of the things I decided to get back to working on was what this book originally was.

It became my sole focus.

It started as a straightforward longevity guide. Then in its introduction, I added a section about mindset. Because in order to live longer, you have to want to. The more you want it, the more effort you will put into following the advice. So, I wrote about how to improve the love of life. As I kept writing, it got way bigger than the actual main part of the book. So, I decided to split it into 2 separate books. Then it got much bigger, so I made it its own thing, separate from the longevity guide. Then it became a 3-part book: Setting the Scene, Igniting the Fire, and Walking the Path. And then it got much bigger again. So now here you are with book 1 of 3 in your hand.

Everything I did in life was to support my writing. Longevity became an important part of my life. The more I learnt about the subject, the more motivated I became to practice the means of extending my health span. And conveniently, what is good for longevity, is also good for overall health, and therefore what I was learning was supporting my energy levels, my motivation, and my ability to focus. The more I followed longevity advice, the better I was able to write, and the better I was able to feel in general. I was full of energy, and everything started to feel very different.

Three Worlds

I see clearly now, the three worlds I have experienced.

People with a sense of purpose judge people who are ‘lazy’ or aimless, but don’t understand how much of a devastating effect it can have on you when you don’t have a purpose, and you don’t even know what it feels like to have it. And that is only one of many difficulties they could be facing.

I am fortunate enough to know what it is like to have purpose, to have the most ambitious life goals possible, to the extent of giving all of myself to its acquisition. I used to think of it as having a castle in the sky. I had a goal that felt impossible, but all I had to do was build the foundations underneath, and as long as I was doing that, I was happy.

I was convinced that was the best way to live. I learned I was very wrong about that, and I will explain the reasoning throughout the first book.

Whatever it is I am doing right now, I don’t know how to define it, beyond just living… I have never felt better. And I know for certain that I don’t have the balance right yet in my life in a lot of ways, and should I get better at figuring that balance out, for certain I’ll feel even better. But I know the directions I am moving in can lead me there. To better and better places. Freedom. The ability to reach absolute full potential. It’s all out there for the taking.

It’s now that I am deep into writing this book series, that I have discovered that what I was working on in the first part of my life was not pointless.

It has actually had a massive impact on my writing. Perhaps it was that legacy skill set that actually directed the progression from longevity to mindset in the first place.

My Obsession

Information is the raw material we build everything upon… With great knowledge comes great motivation. I know the importance of it. I know how to properly evaluate it. I know the importance of viewing it from every known perspective. I know how essential it is that all information and all conclusions must remain open to interpretation upon the discovery of new information and new perspectives.

That is what I’ll proudly boast about.

That’s my priority. Truth.

Information information information.

Knowledge is everything.