The most important self-help book is written by…people!

Excerpt from the self-help book "The Heroes Next Door", by the author Vangelis Gerogiannis

Looking for inspiration

It was a few months after my first book was published and I was looking for inspiration for the next one. I had some thoughts, but nothing was clear in my mind. In no time at all, I interviewed an ultramarathoner for the media where I was working at the time, which gave me the impetus to start writing this particular book. "To do long distances, you have to train your body and your mind, have willpower, patience, pain tolerance, proper nutrition, discipline and always keep the word 'I can' in your mind".

This is what the athlete told me then and "tied" it to the answer he gave me to the question:

"What made you start running and the Ultramarathon?" So she told me this: “I started running by accident after a meeting with a friend of mine. She was then going to run a half-marathon and I told her "I'll come to run in the morning and then I'll go to football". "You won't make it," he tells me. "Are you betting?" I say to her. And that's how the germ of running came in."

It seems like something simple. A bet you make with a friend for fun, you prove to him that you can, and then, seeing that you love it, you continue. I wasn't sure, however, that this is how it goes, and my doubt was confirmed in the following period by talking to others.

The influence of (fellow) people

I thought that next to me, next to you, next to us, there must be other people doing amazing things without anyone knowing about them. At least in the beginning, because some become known through their example and the influence they exert on the world. Nowadays, social media also help a lot. Not that it matters how recognizable they are. It doesn't concern them either.

People literally next door, who have learned to respond to life's challenges, to inspire with their actions, to take responsibility for what happens to them, to apply daily positive habits and to progress, even though most have had to face and manage very difficult situations. Situations that led to huge changes. In some cases, they bottomed out and then resurfaced.

So I went into the process of looking for such cases of people believing that my task would be very difficult.

Where to find them? Will they want to talk? Will what they share have substance? Will they be able to inspire others?

I started with people next door who I knew about their stories and also continued to research online and from my wider environment, which paid off. Their response was very touching, even though most of them did not know me and I would like to thank them for that. They said yes to my call to try to inspire those who choose to read this book.

To prove to them that you don't have to be big and ugly to change your life and the world and that dreams can come true. You don't need to have special skills, everyone has them.

From lesson to lesson

Some people have to suffer to learn. Many suffer, but do not learn. If the majority learned from suffering, as individuals, but also as a society, we would live in a completely different reality.

Certainly more humane, certainly less materialistic and we would certainly avoid a lot of suffering. If you think you learn from suffering, I can easily prove to you with simple examples that you don't. That we don't always. You've told yourself many times that you won't talk on your cell phone while driving and not only have you not followed through, you're texting too! Sometimes you have had a little too much to drink, but nothing shakes you and you normally hold the steering wheel in your hands at the risk of killing yourself or killing others.

Remember when someone dies especially at a young age how you feel and what you say to yourself. "Only health, nothing else makes sense. Not the fights, not the egos, not the money. Will we take them together?' If he has died of a heart attack, you run to schedule heart tests, check your cholesterol, blood sugar, and everything else.

And yet in the next hours or days you forget everything. You continue your daily life as if nothing happened. You fall back into your habits and your promises are broken. The critical point is when the pain, the sadness, the frustration, the intensity of an unpleasant experience begins to pass. If you then return to the same patterns of behavior, the game is lost.

In my environment, there are some people who quit smoking, who started a healthy diet and improved their quality of life, at the age of 50 and over. Why had it never bothered them until that age? Because they had the feeling that they are not going to suffer anything, that they are invulnerable. Diseases are for others.

The most critical moment

So when at some point a heart attack and high blood sugar knocked on their door, they were afraid they were going to die. The one who smoked two packs of cigarettes, drank his coffee with five spoons of sugar, the next day he was literally a different person. He cut out cigarettes, preferred tea (of course without sugar), lost 15 kilos and changed his life. The same person from one day to the next! The same man who last night was eating chips and drinking soda while watching movies on TV.

In these cases the suffering became a lesson through the fear of losing something very important such as our life. Of course, there are also people who continue to smoke normally despite the first "bell", thinking that they will avoid it.

During one of my visits to the cardiologist, he had told me: “What strikes me is that healthy people come to be examined. I also stop working when people come to my office who have already had surgery and are still smoking. I tell them one, I tell them two, I can't do anything else."

I believe we are all students of life and will be until we die. Our presence on earth is for the purpose of learning and evolving. The book of life does not have the same number of pages for everyone and no one knows which is the last page. We see each page, corresponding to each day.

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