Book Review, Summary, Highlights, and Quotes from The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life by Boyd Varty
This is one of my top 5 favorite books of all time.
It’s inspirational. It’s beautifully written. It’s short.
It is one of a handful of books that I keep coming back to and reading over and over.
Yet, strangely, I haven’t written a review for it.
I can’t recommend it enough, though.
Boyd Varty grew up tracking leopards at the Londolozi Game Reserve in South Africa and tells a story of his own personal growth and inspiration to figure out what he should do with his life.
The story follows an expert tracker’s love for what they do, his own relationship with his father, and his complicated upbringing, and much more.
So if you are feeling like you’ve lost your way a bit, or just in need of some inspiration, this is the perfect little book for you.
Highly recommend!
AR Score: 10/10
Best Quotes From The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life by Boyd Varty
Inside you is the wild part of you that knows what your gift, purpose, and mission are. That part of you is wild and elusive. It cannot be captured, as it is always evolving. To live on its trail, you must become a tracker.
— Boyd Varty, The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life
Part of waking yourself, it seems to me, is made by paying attention. Most of us are looking but not seeing.
— Boyd Varty, The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life
Nature doesn’t see status or wealth or social position. It cares only about presence, one’s ability to read the signs, navigate the terrain, and translate the language of the wilderness. Nature is the great equalizer.
— Boyd Varty, The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life
Too much uncertainty is chaos, but too little is death.
— Boyd Varty, The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life
No one can tell you what your track will be or how to know what calls you and brings you to life. That’s your work to do.
— Boyd Varty, The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life
I had always thought that I needed to be somebody in the world. […] don’t try to be someone, rather find the thing that is so engaging that it makes you forget yourself.
— Boyd Varty, The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life
Obsessed with thinking, modern culture has forgotten the innate knowledge of the body. How its signals are a guide, how it knows what it needs to be healthy. How it can tell you if something is right for you or not by the way it feels. We must learn to read the subtle tracks of the body, the way it relaxes and opens when something feels right, the contraction and tightness when we are not where we are meant to be.
— Boyd Varty, The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life
In the bush and in life, we don’t get trails fully laid out. We get tremendous unknowns and, if we are lucky, first tracks. Then next first tracks.
— Boyd Varty, The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life
I am a person who. likes secrets, and I am a person who has felt that I can only truly know myself in forgotten places.
— Boyd Varty, The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life
To me a master is anyone who can be themselves in any situation.
— Boyd Varty, The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life
In the bush I don’t think of myself on some social hierarchy. The birds and animals don’t judge me. In complete solitude, we are not a concept of ourselves: we are ourselves.” – Boyd Varty
— Boyd Varty, The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life
The deepest lessons must be lived.
— Boyd Varty, The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life
Maybe for the first time in human history, modern society — the dominatnt culture — has become the thing that isolates us.
— Boyd Varty, The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life
On the trail there is not one way; the only mistake is to not make any choice. As it is in life.
— Boyd Varty, The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life
More Boyd Varty
- Website: BoydVarty.com
- Podcast: Track Your Life
- Travel: Londolozi Game Reserve
- Facebook: @boydvartyinc
- X: @BoydVarty
- Instagram: @boyd_varty
- Video Interview w/ Tim Ferris:
Other Short Books I like:
- The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday
- Getting to Yes with Yourself: (and Other Worthy Opponents) by William Ury
- Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality by Anthony De Mello (My Review)
- The Way of Life According to Lao Tzu translated by Witter Bynner (My Review)
- The Almanack of Naval Ravikant by Eric Jorgenson (My Review)