41 pages • 1 hour read
Joshua MedcalfChop Wood Carry Water: How to Fall In Love With the Process of Becoming Great
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Background
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Key Figures
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaChapters 22-31Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 22 Summary: “Famous Failures”
Jackie Chan, the singer, athlete, and movie star, visits the community. Mr. Chan delivers an extensive speech on failure as a stepping stone on the path to success. He lists famous examples of successful men and women who once faced setbacks but continued through the loss. That night, John reflects on what these people achieved, despite setbacks, and affirms his desire to keep working.
Chapter 23 Summary: “The Illusion of Partially Controllable Goals”
John stays at the range alone hoping to surpass his rival Katsuo’s achievements. Akira suggests this type of goal-setting to be impractical. Akira tells of a journey he and his one-time lover experienced in which Akira drove relentlessly toward a waterfall, though he never reached it. On the way, he alienated his lover and made a fool of himself in the pursuit of achieving a goal he saw as achievable. Akira explains that even if he had reached the falls, the destruction he’d left behind him in rushing toward his goal was not worth it. John says he understands.
Chapter 24 Summary: “The Fight”
Katsuo and John get into a physical altercation in the dining hall after Katsuo laughs at John’s poor performance in the tournament. In the fight, John’s arm is broken. When Akira arrives, he finds John in a cast and tells him that every crisis presents an opportunity for growth. Akira asks John to make a list of all the things he can do without his arm—places to focus his attention and grow.
Chapter 25 Summary: “Principles Instead of Feelings”
Chapter 26 Summary: “Warrior Dial”
Akira asks John, on his first day back at the range, where his warrior dial is on a scale of one to 10 and where he needs to be to shoot cleanly. John realizes he is mentally at an eight while he needs to be at a four. To turn down the warrior dial, Akira suggests deep breathing, meditation, and talking lower and slower. John practices this at the range and feels his appropriately tuned warrior dial giving him fresh focus.
Chapter 27 Summary: “They”
John has been chopping wood and carrying water, shooting, and training his mind for nearly a decade. Akira warns John that in society, once he returns, he will be pulled toward the norm, toward the center, and shunned for being different. The “they” of society is destructive to creativity and growth. Akira warns John not to preach what he learned because, in John’s world, the wisdom isn’t sought. He must not preach without the invitation to preach.
Chapter 28 Summary: “A New Name”
John graduates as a successful samurai archer, and Akira takes him on a final walk through the community. Akira asks John what he wants to be called, and he replies that Jonathan is his new name. This signifies his transition from Johnny as a boy to John in youth and now to Jonathan, a man of character and principle. He thanks his teacher and departs.
Chapter 29 Summary: “Final Thoughts”
With John’s parable at an end, the author’s voice takes over the narration, explaining that his hero, Judah Smith, once told him to love the audience, not the sermon, and the sermon will be perfect.
Chapter 30 Summary: “What Do You Do With All Your Time”
Medcalf shares the moment that changed him from an ambitious youth without focus to a focused man. Someone asks him how he spends his time, and he is unable to show focus and commitment to his craft. He immediately removes distractions from his life and focuses on his mission. He removes toxic and negative people from his life and realizes that by actually taking his mission seriously, he is achieving it. Medcalf encourages readers to track how they spend their time to see if they truly are committed to their missions.
Chapter 31 Summary: “Drowning Without a Mission”
Medcalf encourages living a mission-driven versus goal-driven life. Medcalf explains that his organization, Train to be CLUTCH, is a mission-driven organization meant to inspire people to live meaningful and rich lives. He encourages readers to live lives that inspire love and inspire others to think about how they view the world and their place in it.
Chapters 22-31 Analysis
As this section begins, John has lost the archery tournament to his rival and has fought with his teacher, Akira. He gets in a physical fight with Katsuo and can no longer train. In traditional fictional storytelling, John has hit rock bottom and must change in order to succeed.
John is hyper-emotional and lacks the regulation needed to control his feelings. Akira asks John to consider framing his responses around principles rather than emotions, which frees John from his need to respond to every perceived provocation. This is a major turning point for John, who has been focused on mental training and physical training to the detriment of the emotional. With these elements balanced, John at last prepares to cross the finish line, despite setbacks. It is precisely these losses that give John the foundation needed to reframe his mindset, harness his emotions, and focus on Being Mission Driven Versus Goal-Oriented. In the final chapters of the extended parable, John reconciles his mistakes, confronts his shortcomings, and focuses on a positive mindset. When he at last finishes his training and departs, both John and Akira are more concerned with the type of man John has become than with the athletic milestone he has achieved. Significantly, the extended parable does not conclude with a demonstration of John’s samurai archery skill or an overview of his newfound physical abilities.
In the final chapters of Chop Wood Carry Water, Medcalf completes the extended parable featuring John and Akira and then switches to a first-person narrative structure in which he addresses the reader directly with a personable tale of his own growth and how he honed a positive mindset. Here, Medcalf has shed the proxy of Akira and explains how he stripped away unnecessary people, habits, and time-wasting activities in order to focus on the attainment of his vision of success, speaking to the theme of The Relationship Between Success and Sacrifice. In many ways, Medcalf’s journey mirrors John’s. He begins as a young man trying to find success without having to make the necessary sacrifices or live the daily grind. It takes a drastic moment of introspection for Medcalf to shake free from the quick-fix, shortcut mentality and instead commit to working tirelessly toward the attainment of one’s mission.
Medcalf’s Christian faith informs his storytelling. His use of parables mimics the storytelling structure of the Bible, while his message is a blend of Protestant work ethic and New Testament gratitude and positivity. While Medcalf does not advise readers (through the parable of John and Akira) to focus their lives around the Christian faith, he does use the vehicle of Akira to advise a principle-focused outlook over an emotionally-reactive one. Medcalf leaves which principles are best for the organization of one’s outlook up to the reader, offering only a hint of religiosity in the delivery of this self-help tactic.
Although Medcalf trains athletes professionally, his consulting firm also advises businessmen and women and offers leadership training in addition to mindset training. The book offers a range of advice for the average reader, but the majority of the chapters do apply most directly to athletes training in their sport of choice, particularly regarding the importance of The Daily Commitment to One’s Craft. Many of the success stories referenced by Akira are athletes, and when John struggles at the archery range, practical advice about regulation, training, and conditioning is interspersed with Akira’s life advice. Medcalf, as a mindset trainer for a university athletics team, understands the unique challenges facing an athlete and has developed a philosophy that blends physical with mental training and emotional regulation. Medcalf’s book makes mental training easy to understand for both the elite athlete training for a life of competition and the CEO hoping to rule the boardroom, as well as the mom hoping to gain discipline in her yoga routine. Chop Wood Carry Water uses accessible parables told in a manner that is neither lecturing nor commanding. This culminates with a call to action in the final chapters in which Medcalf encourages readers to continue their mental training with his consultancy.
