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This week we talk to Mishka Shubaly
After receiving an MFA from Columbia University, Mishka promptly quit writing to play music. He lived out of a Toyota minivan for a year, touring nonstop, and has shared the stage with artists like The Strokes, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs and The Decemberists.
His Kindle Singles for Amazon have all been bestsellers. He writes true stories about drink, drugs, disasters, desire, deception and their aftermath. The Long Run is Mishka’s mini-memoir and details his transformation from alcoholic drug abuser to sober ultrarunner. His latest Kindle single is called Of Mice and Me and details him finding an orphaned baby mouse and the life lessons it brought to him.
Also at the end of the interview we have a pre-release of a song from Mishka’s forthcoming record.
In This Interview Mishka and I Discuss…
- The One You Feed parable.
- Watching the wolves battle since he was a kid.
- Nihilism and self defeating behaviors.
- How he celebrated his 5 years of sobriety.
- The ebb and flow of life.
- Remembering and forgetting our life lessons.
- How running is his meditation and prayer
- Doing the hard thing and embracing the challenges remind him that he wants to be alive.
- How its harder to train for six weeks than to run 10 miles at once.
- That smaller changes can be more difficult to maintain.
- Changing the default posture of our mind.
- How his mantra went from Fuck It to Try Every Day.
- Success being built on a series of failures.
- Learning to recover from our mistakes
- Extending the benefit of doubt to ourselves.
- The negative voice of the bad wolf.
- How we won’t recover from addiction unless it is the most important thing in the world.
- His fear of AA.
- How there are no magic bullets.
- His public promise to attend an AA meeting.
- How it’s worth trying anything once, expect maybe crystal meth.
- Our communal desire for having a lot of pain over a long period of time versus a brief intense pain.
- How following our dreams is not always the right approach.
- Playing music for the love of it.
- How the only thing that makes us happy is happiness.
- How getting everything we want doesn’t always make us happy.
- Posting a picture of the The Strokes guitar player’s ass all across Manhattan.
Mishka Shubaly Links
Mishka Shubaly Homepage
Misha Shubaly Amazon Author page
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Hella says
Thanks for this interview. I enjoyed it and it also touched me in places I try not to go. For that I am grateful. I bought a couple of ebooks from Mishka as well. 🙂 Keep up up all this fantastic stuff you are doing here on The One You Feed …the world and I need you.
Clare says
My favourite so far.
Eric Zimmer says
Thanks!
Balsac says
Mishka is a solid dude.
I was at many of those shows and knew the strokes guys. Man, what a bunch of opportunistic dicks!!! Especially the two guitar players. I can tell you first hand that none of those guys ever worked for anything in their lives. A lot of the content in that lizzy goodman book is total revisionist bs.