Survival Fitness: What's Your New Year's Resolution?

This is the time of year when lots of people make New Year's resolutions, and many of those resolutions involve commitments to get back in shape.  A lot of those thoughts are fueled by guilty feelings brought on by eating rich holiday foods in excess, as well as general increased levels of depression from being stuck inside a lot more during the winter months.  Unfortunately, most people don't stick to their New Year's resolutions any more than they do most fitness goals they may set at other times of the year.

The reason is that most people see getting back in shape as a temporary problem that they think they can solve in a few weeks.  When it doesn't happen, they just give up and go back to their old ways, quickly undoing any fitness gains they may have made.  To be successful at long-term fitness, you must change your way of thinking about it and make it a permanent part of your lifestyle.  This doesn't mean you have to join an expensive gym and go work out with a bunch of sweaty strangers in public, but you've got to make a conscious effort to get regular exercise and eat sensibly if you expect lasting benefits.

I've written about this before, but when it comes to survival preparedness, nothing you can buy in the way of gear or equipment can make as much difference in your odds of getting through a disaster as having the proper mindset and the physical conditioning to deal with adversity.  Many people don't want to hear that, as it is easier to purchase a bunch of stuff than to actually get outdoors and subject themselves to rigorous camping trips, hikes, bike rides or survival skills training exercises.  But the more challenges you put yourself through physically, the more confidence you will gain in your abilities, and it is that confidence that gives you the mindset you need.

We live in a time when everyday life is easier than it has ever been, in terms of physical effort needed to accomplish necessary tasks.  For many people, seeking comfort is a primary goal and they have become so accustomed to always experiencing comfortable temperatures, safe and secure living and working environments and a limitless supply of infinitely varied food and drink that they would go to pieces if these things were taken away.

Rigorous exercise is one way to quickly snap your body out of the comfort zone.  By stressing your muscles and aerobic capacity you can gradually condition yourself to become comfortable with increasing levels of activity to the point where you will actually begin to enjoy it and want to push harder.  The key to this enjoyment though is to find exercise activities that you actually like doing.  For me, hiking, paddling a canoe or kayak or riding a bicycle are all things I look forward to.  I may not get as much enjoyment out of the dumbbell workout routine I do three times per week, but by keeping it sensible and limiting the amount of time it takes to complete it, it's been easy to stick with it.   I've also been involved in the martial arts since my early teens, and while I'm not actively practicing Kenpo in a school these days, I still do a daily stretching routine first thing in the morning and often go through forms, techniques and basics to maintain at least some of my ability.

This year one of my main fitness goals is to increase my weekly mileage on my road bike and participate in several century (100-mile) rides.  I've found that long-distance bike riding is one of the most enjoyable aerobic workouts for me, and I like it much better than running, which seems like drudgery.  If I can get in a decent ride a few times per week I feel a whole lot better, have much more energy and can eat just about anything I want without worry.  If I had the time to do it, I would prefer to spend my days canoeing or kayaking or back country hiking in some stunning mountain wilderness, but that's just not feasible nearly as often as a one or two hour bike ride.  I'm fortunate to live in an area where I have many miles of quiet country roads with little traffic, good hills and smooth pavement right outside my door.

With two major book projects to complete in the next few months, I'm forced to spend a lot of time sitting in a chair with a keyboard in front of me as are many people in this strange lifestyle our modern technology has enabled.  For me, it's essential to take frequent activity breaks and use other parts of my body besides my fingers.  Fitness has to be more than a New Year's resolution.  It has to be a lifestyle, especially as you get older, if you want to continue doing the things that were effortless in your teens and twenties.

A lifestyle of fitness is also essential you are to have any hope of surviving the kind of major upheaval many preppers are concerned about.  If you're reading survival blogs such as this one, you've probably at least given some thought to scenarios that could snap you out of a high-tech life of ease in a heartbeat.  If so, what are you doing to keep your mind and body prepared to deal with it?  Have you made a New Year's resolution to get back in shape?  If so, will you give up on it by February or March, or are you ready to go beyond temporary resolutions you can't keep and change your lifestyle permanently?

Book Review: Will To Live: Dispatches from the Edge of Survival

 
The title of Les Stroud's new book covers an aspect of survival that I've posted about here several times in the past: the importance of the right mental attitude and the unstoppable determination to make it out of difficult situations in spite of seemingly impossible obstacles. See these posts: On Maintaining a Positive Attitude, and Can't Never Could.  In addition to what I've said about the importance of the mental aspects of survival here on Bug Out Survival, my new book, Getting Out Alive: 13 Deadly Scenarios and How Others Survived, drives home this point in every chapter. In examining the stories of how the most improbable survivors made it through extreme ordeals, we often find that it is attitude that plays a much bigger role in the outcome than learned skills, experience or equipment used.

Ironically, I was writing Getting Out Alive last year at apparently about the same time Stroud was working on his book between his numerous trips all over the world to film his TV series Beyond Survival.  I found out about the book a month or so before it's February 1, 2011 release when the publisher sent me a review copy as I was correcting the final proofs of my own book.  

Obviously, books like Will to Live: Dispatches from the Edge of Survival are of great interest to me, and I've been reading survivor stories like these since I was a kid dreaming of big game hunting trips and jungle adventures. Back in those days I found such stories in the pages of magazines like Sports Afield, Outdoor Life and The Reader's Digest.  I read them all and learned what I could from them.  Later, I began devouring book-length travel narratives written by outdoor adventurers doing their thing in some of the most exotic parts of the world, and such reading fueled the fire that made me have to get out and do the trips that led to my own books.

Les Stroud is best known for his television shows such as Survivorman, but is also the author of Survive!: Essential Skills and Tactics to Get You Out of Anywhere - Alive. I've enjoyed several episodes of Survivorman from time-to-time, but I'm not much of a television watcher and rarely spend time viewing survival shows or anything else on TV. But his extensive travels for his television work have taken him into a wide range of environments and circumstances in which to test and develop his skills, and it shows through in Will To Live.  Much of the book is first-person narrative in which he relates such adventures as his time spent among the Waorani in the Amazon, interwoven with the stories of real-life survivors and what they endured.  In each case study in which an epic account of survival is related, Stroud finds ample opportunity to share his related personal experience and to offer tips and advice in sidebars sprinkled throughout each chapter.   These sidebars also include checklists of gear that should have been carried by participants in some of the activities that got them into trouble, such as a Survival Kit for Rafting, Sea Survival Kit, and Car Survival Kit.

Many of the real-life accounts will be familiar to readers here, as  I have posted in the past and written in my own books about Yossi Ghinsberg's jungle survival ordeal and the death of Chris McCandless who perished in the Alaskan bush during an experiment in living off the land.  Another chapter focuses on the story of Nando Parrado who survived 72 days in the Andes after a famous plane crash in 1972 and later wrote about his epic struggle along with his fellow survivors against cold and hunger in his book, Miracle in the Andes. In each of these chapters examining the accounts of survivors, Stroud points out both the mistakes made and the things that were done right.

If you're looking for an entertaining read that you can also learn from, I highly recommend Will To Live.  Among the various bloggers and forum posters in the survival and prepping community, from time-to-time I run across comments advising readers to pass on books like this because they're not worth the money or would not be a necessary addition to the survival library.  I would suggest that you ignore such advice and consider that a book like Will To Live (currently listed at $11.85 on Amazon) offers a whole lot of entertaining reading with the bonus that you might learn something in the process.  Consider that most magazines these days run around $7.00 an issue and are filled with much more advertising than real articles, not to mention that most people toss them after one reading.  All of us with an interest in survival topics have the usual how-to books on the shelf, and you should make them a priority as well if you're serious about learning.  But make some room for related entertaining reading as well, and you might be surprised when one day you find yourself in an extreme situation and some small bit of knowledge you acquired from something you read about another person's ultimate test resurfaces just when you need it most.

Trapped In the Wild

Have you ever given any though to what it would be like to be alone in a remote place, trapped by a fallen tree or shifting boulder, unable to free yourself and too far into the backcountry to call for help?  Though most of us don't give this much thought when hiking, camping or paddling through wild areas, such unfortunate circumstances have befallen quite a few individuals in recent times - some who made it out alive and others who did not.  And one can only imagine how many such victims there have been in the course of human history when even more people traveled alone and in truly wild country.

This possibility was on my mind again the past two days as I received the finalized page lay-outs of my new book,  Could You Survive?: 13 Deadly Scenarios and How Others Got Out Alive from my publisher and had to do a final read-through to make any last minute changes before it is sent off to be printed.  As it happens, this "trapped in the wild" scenario is the subject of the first chapter, the title of which is "Cutting Your Losses."    In this chapter I describe a situation in which you are pinned down by an immovable object, while hiking alone well off of a designated trail in a mountain wilderness area.  The only food you have are the items you carried in a day pack for a hike of a few hours.  You're too far from any road to get a cell phone signal.  You didn't tell anyone exactly where you were headed or when you expected to be back, and now your ankle is crushed under a massive boulder, leaving you exposed to the frigid night air with inadequate protection and barely enough water to last until the next day.  No one is coming for you, and no one is likely to find you by accident.  What would you do?  You have a multitool with several sharp blades in your daypack.  The only way to freedom is to cut off your leg at the knee.  Could you do it?  If not, death is certain, it's just a matter of time, and the vultures are already circling, awaiting their opportunity.

You've probably read of some of the individuals who had to make just such a choice - like Aron Ralston,who was rock climbing in a remote slot canyon when a boulder shifted and pinned his hand to the cliff wall.  Ralston ended up cutting off his own arm at the elbow to escape, and later wrote a book about the ordeal:  Between a Rock and a Hard Place.  Now several years later, his story is about to get much more widespread attention with the release of a new movie: 127 Hours  (see trailer below).

You might think that such nightmarish circumstances only befall dare-devil  adrenaline junkies like Ralston, who was obviously engaged in a high-risk activity to begin with and who foolishly told no one where he was going.

But consider what happened to Mike Turner, a 48-year-old, experienced backpacker who was hiking in a Wyoming wilderness area when a he was trapped by shifting rocks while crossing a boulder field.  After more than a week, in which he could not free himself, he died of exposure and dehydration and was not found until more than 2 weeks later.  Others have been trapped by fallen trees while cutting timber or firewood.  One whose story was on all the prime time new channels a few years ago was Donald Wyman, who had to cut his leg off at the knee and make a tourniquet from the starter cord of his chainsaw.  He then crawled to his bulldozer, drove it to his pickup, and then drove the truck to the nearest farm using a metal file to depress the clutch when he needed to shift gears. He knew it was either give up his lower leg and foot or die, and he made the choice with little hesitation.

Such a choice is not something anyone wants to contemplate for long.  The key to avoiding it is to turn up your awareness level to the max anytime you stray off the beaten path, and especially if you do so alone.  As I mentioned in a previous post, Watch Your Step. 

Another key element to safety when traveling alone in a wild, unfamiliar place is to know your environment.  Even if you don't know the area from first-hand experience, research at home before you go can turn up lots of good information and alert you to dangers you might not have known about without prior reading.  An example of this that I turned up in my research for this same chapter on getting trapped in the wild are the many tragic stories I read of people trapped in the mud flats of Alaska's tidal rivers.  Had they known the dangers, they would not have ventured out onto this treacherous silt that can hold a person's leg as surely as cement until the returning tide comes in to drown them under several feet of frigid seawater.

The conclusion to this is that in planning your bug-out locations or just recreational trips into places new to you, try to learn everything you possibly can about the local conditions there before you go.

Regarding the movie: 127 Hours, I have not seen it yet but I definitely plan to check it out. I remember first reading about Ralston's ordeal in Outside magazine right after it happened and thought then that it was an incredible story of survival.  Here's the trailer from YouTube:

Can't Never Could....

All my life I heard the same advice from my dad whenever I complained about the difficulty of something or especially if I made the mistake of saying, "I can't."  His standard reply was "Can't never could do nothing."

When I was 25 years old, I sold everything I had and set out to see the islands of the Caribbean with a 17-foot sea kayak loaded down with camping gear.  It was an experience that would re-shape my life.

This post is about not listening to those who say "you can't" do something.  It's also on not following the crowd (or the herd, as I prefer to say in my book of rants called Astray of the Herd).

The reason I'm bringing this up is because of the common human behavior of groups discouraging individuals from attempting something outside the usual comfort zone of the group or larger numbers of individuals that make up the group.  Propose any such risky idea or unconventional enterprise to a group of other people, and you will quickly see it get shot down by one or many others in the group who will tell you not to attempt it, because they wouldn't.

An interesting post on the Boat Bits sailing blog I frequently read discussed this very thing just the other day in a piece called The Urge To Follow The Crowd.  The author tells of a post on a popular sailing discussion board in which a new member asked advice about sailing his relatively small, but seaworthy boat on a quite significant but very doable offshore passage from south Florida to Puerto Rico.  Naturally, the naysayers had to pipe in and kill the dream, advising the owner of the boat to instead have it shipped to Puerto Rico rather than attempt to sail it there on its own hull.  And this on a forum devoted to "Sailing Far."

This reminded me of so many times I've heard the same thing: "You can't."  You can't do this, or you can't do that, because....  but the person saying it never concludes with the truth: "because I can't, or because I'm afraid to."  I heard it when I announced to friends and family back when I was 25 that I was selling or giving away everything I owned except what would fit in a kayak and setting off to see how far as I could go, paddling from Mississippi to Florida and beyond in the Caribbean.  I did the trip anyway over the next 13 months and had the time of my life.  I heard "you can't" when I went to Florida and bought a 30-year old 26-foot sailboat for $5000 and  sailed it home to Mississippi, fixed it up, and moved aboard it with my then wife and went cruising.  I heard "you can't" when I said I was going to write books, and so on, and so on.   I even  heard it every day in Spanish: "No Puede Ir!"  (You can't go!) when my friend Ernest and I set out to hike through the Honduran jungle to the upper Patuca River with a folding Pak Canoe and then paddle to the coast. I've heard it all my life and I still hear it.


The above example of the sailing forum is one reason I take Internet discussion forums with a grain of salt.  I read a lot of great forums on subjects I'm interested in - many of them can be found in the links to the right - but I rarely post on any of them.  I read them to learn from others who have been somewhere or done something I want to know about, or have owned or tested some item I'm interested in.  But I've seen enough to know that I don't need all the "you can't" replies if I were to post a question like the guy in the above-mentioned sailing forum did. 

Survival forums can be among the worst.  I see discussion after discussion of "bugging-out" vs. "bugging in", 45. vs. 9mm, AR vs. AK, and on and on and on.  With regard to survival, and especially wilderness survival, there sure is a lot of the "you can't" attitude out there.  I don't bother, but would love to ask some of these negative posters why, if they are so sure that they and no one else in the discussion could survive in the woods (or whatever situation is the topic of the hour) then why are they even on a survival forum?  Just because the popular crowd's consensus is "you can't", should we just curl up in the fetal position and wait to die if the SHTF?  When it comes to survival, either you do or you don't.  There's really no in between.  But one thing is for certain, if you don't believe in yourself enough to believe you can, then you probably won't try hard enough to succeed.

That's the rant for today.  Just remember: "Can't never could do nothing" and take that four-letter word out of your vocabulary. 

Dealing with Potential Aggressors in a Bug Out Situation

I just read a couple of very interesting posts by RG Padgett on his blog: Survive the Worst.  The author and his family ran into trouble when their living environment in an urban apartment quickly deteriorated because of a sudden influx of troublemakers into the complex, brought on by the manager's desire to fill a large number of vacant units.  He describes how this situation developed in his post Vote With Your Feet, and then offers some great advice on security and diffusing potential attacks in the follow up: Lessons Learned From a Real World Bug Out.  Padgett makes some good points here that are not often discussed when the subject of bugging out comes up. 

In particular, he stresses awareness of your surroundings and those who live around you, as well as awareness of warning signs such as symbols, graffiti, dress and habits of gang members and other potential criminals who might pose a threat.  He also recommends maintaining a low profile by blending in and not doing anything to stand out, yet also remaining careful not to show any signs of weakness, which is easily detected by human predators who might do you harm just as it is in the predator-prey relationship in the wild. 

These two posts bring back vivid memories to me of my experiences in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, in 2005.  At the time, I owned a small cruising sailboat that I was docking in a real backwater marina in a bayou near the western edge of the Mississippi Gulf Coast.  My brother and his family lived in a house located just a few blocks off the beach in Gulfport.  In the last 24-hours of this monster storm's approach, when it became apparent that we were gonna get nailed by this one, I secured the boat as best I could with every anchor and mooring line I had on board, and my brother and his family took as many of their possesions as they could and left their home as well.  We all waited it out in Jackson, far from the worst of it, but two days later, as soon as enough downed trees were cut off of one lane of U.S. Highway 49 to make it somewhat passable, we were anxious to get back to find out if my brother still had a home, and if I still had a boat.

As far as getting there, we were better off than most, in that I had taken five 6-gallon jerry cans off the boat and had filled them all with gasoline while it was still available.  With my four-cylinder Mazda truck, we had enough range to get there and back with ease, as well and deal with potential contingencies.  We also had plenty of food and drinking water, as well as tools, weapons and ammunition.  I covered the jerry cans that were lashed in the bed of the pickup with a tarp, for concealment.  We had already heard reports filtering in on the news of looting, car-jacking and other craziness, and it made us nervous to be toting so much in the way of supplies when there were people who would do anything to get enough gas to leave the area.  At this stage of the game, a few National Guard troops were just moving into the area, but it would be much longer before security was restored. 

We made it to the slab that was all that remained of my brother's house, after having to park several blocks away and hike through the rubble of his devastated neighborhood.  The we made our way to the  closest point we could drive to the marina where I had kept the boat, and I off-loaded the rowing dinghy I had in the back of the truck and left my brother there to guard our stuff while I made my way down the bayou to see if there was anything left.  The entire area was an apocalyptic scene of 70-foot steel hulled shrimp boats thrown high and dry far into the woods, tangled up with cruising sailboats, vehicles and parts of houses.  I didn't expect much, and sure enough, when I reached the marina, there was no sign of my boat.  It would take much longer than a short foray down the bayou to find out where it had come to rest, but for now, I was nervous about leaving the truck for too long.

As it turned out, it was a good thing there were two of us and that my brother was armed.  While he was waiting, two men approached out of the woods and began asking questions, one trying to circle around behind him while the first attempted to distract him with small talk.  They were from one of the fishing vessels, and had obviously lost everything, but they weren't asking for help, just appraising the truck and looking at the tarp-covered goods in the back.  He had some nervous moments as they sized him up, deterred only by the .45 on his hip that he thought he was going to have to draw.  By the time I got back, they had disappeared into the woods again and we weren't sure if they were watching or not as we quickly  loaded the dinghy and got out of there.  This was certainly one case where a show of strength saved the day, and my brother's cool response diffused a situation that could have gotten ugly fast. 

Survival Myths Regarding Living Off the Land

The first chapter in my new book, Bug Out: The Complete Plan for Escaping a Catastrophic Disaster Before It's Too Late, is entitled THE FANTASY & THE REALITY OF LIVING OFF THE LAND.  I started the book off with this chapter because I see a huge amount of debate and misinformation about the subject posted all around the Internet in various discussion forums, blogs and websites.  Here's an excerpt from that chapter:

It took a long time for modern humans to progress from Stone Age hunter-gatherers to the creators of an artificial environment almost completely insulated and protected from the uncertainties of nature.
As a result, you cannot expect the transition in the other direction to be much easier. Knowledge has been lost, skills that are necessary to thrive in the wild are difficult to learn, and senses and instincts are dulled by lack of daily use in a world where survival of the fittest is no longer the rule.

Although many people today engage in outdoor pursuits like hunting, fishing, hiking, camping, and canoeing, they often do so with the help of expensive high-tech gear like satellite communication and navigation equipment, sophisticated ultra-lightweight stoves, freeze-dried foods, and clothing and shelter systems made of synthetic fabrics. Unfortunately, much of this equipment will eventually fail and may not be replaceable. This is not a problem in times of normalcy when resupplying or returning to civilization are viable options, but in a SHTF situation, you will far better served by cultivating skills and knowledge.

Our ancestors would be amused, to say the least, at the sight of a modern backpacker struggling along under the weight of a bulky pack almost as large as the bearer. They, like the few remaining bands of
aboriginal people still living in isolated groups today in places like the Amazon Basin and New Guinea, could get by with practically nothing but what could be found in their environment.

To approach the prospect of bugging out into the wilderness from a realistic perspective, you have to strike a balance somewhere between the naked native adept and the overburdened recreational outdoorsman when it comes to equipping yourself for survival. It’s also important to have realistic expectations about what life in the wild will be like, whether it is just for a few days or for a period of weeks or months.

I wrote this for the book because I did not want to mislead total newbies to the idea of outdoor survival that bugging out to the wild to live off the land after SHTF would be a picnic.  It seems that people fall into two categories when discussing this topic - those with Rambo fantasies and no experience who think all they need is a knife and a pocket survival kit, and those who think the only way humans can survive is to have a stockpile of every meal they intend to eat for the next five years or beyond.

The truth, of course, is that humans are incredibly adaptable, which is how we got to where we are now in the first place.  We can adapt to changing conditions, and while many individuals are unable or unwilling to do so, those who have the desire and the right attitude can and will be able to adjust to any living conditions ranging from modern comfort all the way back to primeval hand-to-mouth survival.  Don't ever forget that in the span of human existence, the time of the modern Industrial Age is but a few moments compared to the millennia that our ancestors lived a wild or semi-wild existence adjusted to as needed by changing circumstances.   If you think of this time-span in terms of the hours of a single day - our modern separation from nature began probably in the last hour before midnight - and during the previous 23 hours people lived as hunters and gatherers, subsistence farmers and nomadic herders before the invention of internal combustion engines and long-distance communication.

To suggest that it would be impossible for a modern human to survive in the wild or live off the land is absurd.  Sure, it might be hard, as generations of easy living have dulled our senses and awareness and knowledge that was once taken for granted has been lost.  But we have other advantages to make up for it, at least as long as they last - such as better cutting tools and hunting weapons, easy and portable ways to make fire, stay warm and dry, etc.  And even stripped of these modern implements and materials to make them, we can certainly re-learn the time-tested skills of making our tools from what is found in our environment as our ancestors did,  as many modern hobbyists and primitive skills enthusiasts do today.  For all our sophistication, who knows if we are more intelligent than the "savages" we descended from, but there's certainly no reason to think we are any less so.  If they could live on this planet using only simple resources easily obtained in nature - then at least a few of us can too.  

This is a subject I've been interested in my entire life, going all the way back to when I was seven or so, setting out in the woods behind my parent's house to hunt squirrels with an old Benjamin pellet gun.  I constantly thought about what it would be like to have to hunt to eat and how difficult or easy it would be.  I've experimented with it extensively since those days, in all sorts of environments ranging from the woods and swamps where I grew up hunting in Mississippi to places like tropical seashores and reefs, the North Woods, desert, mountain and jungle habitats.  Each environment has it's unique challenges, of course, and each environment also offers unique resources.  Will there be enough of these resources to feed and shelter everyone pouring out of the cities in an attempt to bug out after a SHTF situation?  Of course not.  But how many of these people do you really think are going to try to bug out and take care of themselves in the first place?  The answer is not very many.  Modern civilized people have been conditioned NOT to think in terms of self-sufficiency.  Instead, they will wait for someone else to come to their rescue, leaving the truly remote and difficult-to-reach uninhabited areas available to those of us who are willing to take our chances there.

If you have any doubts about your wilderness survival skills, now is the time to practice.  Even if you didn't grow up hunting, fishing or foraging for wild edibles, it's never too late to start learning how.  Do this long enough, and your confidence will greatly improve that you can take care of yourself and those dependent upon you if  you are ever put to the test.  Don't be like those who spend their days surfing the Internet for their survival information, echoing what others say by posting on forums about how it would be impossible to survive by bugging out because they personally couldn't do it.  Find out for yourself and prove it by doing.  And all this isn't to say you shouldn't have other preps and perhaps a "bug-in" survival retreat.  There's nothing at all wrong with having more than one plan and back-ups as well - just try to be as ready as possible by being willing to adapt - and willing to stay or go as circumstances dictate.

I'll be posting a lot more on this topic, and I look forward to your comments and questions, and accounts of your own experiences in wilderness survival or living off the land if you have them.

On Maintaining a Positive Attitude

From reading discussion boards and other blogs around the web, it seems to me that far too many survivalists or preparedness-minded individuals place far too much emphasis on acquiring equipment and supplies, rather than developing useful skills and a survival mindset.  Others spend so much time dwelling on doom and gloom negativity to the point where I have to wonder why they would bother to try to survive at all.  If you talk to real survivors who have come through extreme circumstances and lived to tell about it, or if you read the first-person accounts many such individuals have published in books and articles, you will realize most survivors have one thing in common - attitude.  They survive because they have a burning desire to live and to triumph over adversity.

The right attitude often enables those with little in the way of training, experience or equipment to prevail in situations that would defeat most people.  I'm not saying that learned skills and the right equipment are not important - far from it.  But I do think it's extremely important to develop the right attitude early on in your preps and to keep a positive attitude.  Being positive about things is not the same as having your head stuck in the sand and pretending there is nothing to worry about.  It's possible to be a realist and understand the need for self-sufficiency and the survival mindset while still remaining optimistic.  In fact, optimism is essential if you are to attain any goal in life, much less survive an ultimate test such as individual survival in a real SHTF situation.

How do you develop this positive survival attitude or mindset?  I think the best way to do it is to set goals and and make up your mind that you will accomplish them, no matter what.  You can start with small steps, setting easily obtainable goals first to build up your confidence.  Then work on bigger ones.  Once you learn that you can accomplish your goals, you will gradually gain more confidence until you let nothing stand in your way.  This is the key to developing a positive attitude that will see you through a real test.

If it is survival skills that you want to master, start out by setting reasonable goals first and then move on to more difficult ones.  Pack your bug-out bag and head out to the nearest wilderness area to see if you can live out of it for a weekend - or a week.  Want to learn to identify and use local edible plants?  Take a field guide and go locate a new species you haven't used before next time you go on an outing.  Practice building fires in adverse conditions such as rain.  Make the parts for a bow drill and set a goal of learning to build a fire with no matches.  Already a proficient hunter with a rifle?  Learn to hunt with a traditional bow and arrows.  Then learn to make your own bows and arrows.  The accomplishment of each goal will make you a better survivalist and your attitude of confidence will grow stronger until it is unshakable. 

Most importantly, don't listen to those who say you can't do it.  How far would I have gotten on my long-distance sea kayak trips if I had listened to all those who said I couldn't paddle that far?  I ignored them and knew that the key was not thinking about paddling 3,000 miles or even 300 miles, but simply breaking camp each day and paddling my 20 or so miles that I could do before finding another campsite.  Likewise, I would have never bothered to write my first book, much less the five I've written, if I had listened to all those who said it's too hard to get a book published these days.  And what were the chances of getting a new survival book published now with so many excellent titles already out there?  But I did bother and I knew I could make it happen because I set a goal that I was determined to accomplish.  You can too, whatever that goal may be.  But if you don't believe you can do it, then you can't, and if you don't believe you can survive, you won't, and reading about it and collecting gadgets and gear is just an indulgence in fantasy.

For more on what separates the survivors from those who don't make it, check out Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, by Laurence Gonzales.  This is an interesting and eye-opening book on the subject of the survival attitude and mindset.  This post is also just the beginning of my thoughts on this and related subjects.  Look for much more here in posts to come as I want to dispel some of the myths and bad information going around that it seems to me does nothing but instill a feeling of hopelessness in many people.