Carina Roberts

I’ve been in this life for fifty years, been trying to work out its riddle for forty-two, and been keeping diaries of clues to that riddle for the last thirty-five. Notes about successes and failures, joys and sorrows, things that made me marvel, and things that made me laugh out loud. How to be fair. How to have less stress. How to have fun. How to hurt people less. How to get hurt less. How to be a good man. How to have meaning in life. How to be more me. Recently, I worked up the courage to sit down with those diaries.

RK Saber ran from tragedy five years ago when his car went over the side of a mountain in a prom-night crash. Consumed by guilt, he walked away from Juilliard and morphed into Rock, front man for the global rock-band sensation Son of a Jack. Five members. Five best friends. Five rising stars burning so bright, they had to know it couldn't last. When tragedy strikes again and the band goes from five to two, RK is sentenced to...home. Back to the place where all his nightmares started.

Einmal eine Langdistanz finishen - fast jeder Triathlet hat diesen Traum. Die sportlichen Jahreshöhepunkte von "Tagesschau"-Sprecher Thorsten Schröder waren dagegen bisher immer die erfolgreiche Teilnahme am Hamburg-Triathlon und an den Cyclassics gewesen, bevor die Schwimmsachen und das Rennrad bis zum nächsten Frühjahr wieder im Keller verschwanden. Doch als sein Nachbar Fabian ihm von seinem erfolgreichen Langdistanzfinish erzählt, träumt auch Thorsten Schröder plötzlich davon, zum Ironman zu werden.

Struggling with low self-esteem? Still feeling inferior, unworthy, and not good enough despite all your effort to change? On the surface, we should be happy. We have all the things we need - a decent job, a stable income, and great friends. We have improved our self-confidence. We thought that we had overcome our low self-esteem issues. But yet, deep down inside, nothing has changed - we still feel inferior to others. Why is this so? Why don’t we love ourselves? The truth is we have been solving the wrong problem.

Thanks to technology, we live in a world that’s much more comfortable than ever before. But here’s the paradox: Our tolerance for discomfort is at an all-time low. And as we wrestle with a sinking "discomfort threshold", we increasingly find ourselves at the mercy of our primitive instincts and reactions that can perpetuate disease, dysfunction, and impair performance and decision making.