There are few fundamental principles in nature that happen to cut across all aspects of life such that once you see them a few times, you recognize the pattern and apply them in the different areas of your life consistently with predictably good results. They ground your efforts and give you focus and direction.
About one year ago, feeling a bit out of shape, I decided to work out. I started looking at some Youtube videos of home gyms and some workout routines and was a bit intimidated. Everyone online looked like they were carved personally by God himself. Like they had the DNA of the engineers in Prometheus. They all demonstrated workout routines with weights that equal a baby elephant. What? You working out your arms with 5 lbs? Please join the girls on the other side, don't shame the men!!
It didn't help at all when a few weeks in, I started experiencing pain in some joints and tendons. My shoulders started hurting, my knees had that sharp pain when doing a squat my achilles tendon had been having some pain for some time just got worse and at some point, I almost quit thinking that there is no reason to keep hurting myself. I wrongly concluded that the workouts were hurting me. It is only after a few weeks of research that I discovered that, everything that was happening was not due to the workouts, but that the workouts were revealing what had been going on with me. That what was happening would just have came out later in life. I was slacking in taking care of myself and the body had been moving along, trying to cope the best that it could.
In sorting out this mess, I realized that I had to do some physiotherapy for the injured or aching joints and tendons while not neglecting working out for the rest the healthy parts. I also had to incorporate more stretching and get some smaller than acceptable manly weights just to help rebuild some muscles from lower than I had imagined performance.
It has been about a year, and while am not so consistent, most of these issues are slowly going away, and most of the things I couldn't do before, I now do pain free. However, what I discovered in all this was some fundamental principles in life that applied to life in many other ways. So stick around as I tell you a simple but effective way to progress and hopefully, achieve success in many things that you strive for in your life. With this, you will find your starting point, your path to progress and the strength and motivation to move whenever you don’t see the way forward. I summarize it in a few key points as follows:
1. Acceptance: You have been doing it wrong.
It is easy to identify where you are going wrong. The problems are always there, disturbing you all day, nagging you at the back of your mind, looping through your thoughts like a scratched record. You have to push the thoughts aside if you want to do any useful work but they amplify themselves every time you try to relax and clear your mind.
It is time to address these thoughts and help work on them. These thoughts that threaten to eat away your productivity should be accepted, cataloged and scheduled for processing. This is your beginning of working on them.
Whatever aspect you want to address, be it eating healthy, working out, your finances or your social life, these don’t seem to be getting better because you haven’t been working on them. Remember, there is a reason why they are nagging at your mind all the time, you are not at peace because you don’t know whether you are heading in the right direction, whether you need to push harder or you need to slow down a little. You will be at peace once you evaluate.
For example, take workouts. You realize that you are a bit weak for your age. Your muscles haven’t been as good as they were when you were the captain of your school sports team a few years ago. You realize that you need to work out. First point to accept is, you haven’t been working out for quite some time.
With this acceptance you also accept that just like you haven’t been working out for a long time, you will also not get back in shape over night. You accept that it will be a long process but the journey will be worth it. You want to improve your health and fitness.
2. Regress to your true level of comfort, your starting point.
Once you realize your target for improvement, you assess your abilities, the difference between where you are and where you would like to be. Identify some of the problems and barriers to your achievements and most importantly, where you are comfortable starting. You need to be sincere in your starting point. If you can work with a 100 lb weight, it is absurd to only work with 10 lbs. You need to sincerely assess and start at the highest point you can, comfortably of course.
For example, if you want to start working out, check out some exercises, visit a gym and consult with the coaches. For some who want a home workout, go online, checkout some good workouts, get some weights and assess how much weight you can work with without injuring yourself. If in finances, identify some expenses that drain your wallet, identify the ones you can do without and ones you can scale back on. Get some financial advice or just like the workouts, go online and start researching on ways to better finances. Finally, mold your income and expenses in the most appropriate way to improve our finances.
3. Commit to the grind. Results never come quick
Let me tell you the truth, and there are people out there who have tried and know this, whatever you have committed to improve will never feel good. It will never show great levels of improvement. The improvements are so slow that you will never feel like you are doing anything, and most of the time, you will feel like you are just torturing yourself.
There will be that initial euphoria of doing something about your life, the initial dopamine of feeling in control of whatever has been nagging at you. You will be so happy to be pushing things and making things happen. There will be some initial drastic improvement which plateaus real quick. If success or results were easy to come by, everyone who started working on improving themselves would be happy to go through this journey. However, by the time you reach the finish line, or the next level, the euphoria and the excitement at the beginning is long gone. Only the grind remains.
Whatever you do everyday towards your goal counts and also doesn’t count. You may skip a few days, you may commit 100%, nothing seems to make any difference. If you measure after every activity you do, you will only see pain and breakage. You will never see the progress. However, progress is always getting shaped in the background. One month down the line, you start getting used to your activities, for workouts, the pain and soreness disappears, you get more energy and less fatigue from going to the gym. The financial guy starts seeing some savings. You start spending wisely and get sensitive to waste. You start making better decisions on finances both short and long term. Wadsworth Longfellow captured this simply by saying:
The heights by great men reached and kept
Were not attained by sudden flight,
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night.
Pushing aside comparisons, since the most important way to assess your progress is by looking at your old self vs the new, the poem recognizes the value of toiling, especially when you would like to relax and take it easy.
The best way to progress is to write down your objective, break it down to the steps you intend to follow and commit to them. Come rain or sunshine. Whether you feel inspired or not, it doesn’t matter. Keep doing what you wrote down as objectives. Only adjust the objectives with new information and keep following whatever you have down.
Coming back to our examples, if you want to workout, write your workout plan somewhere. Know what you will be doing on the days you go to the gym. e.g. Mondays, leg day (don’t skip leg day!!), Wednesday, bust day, Friday back day. Or if finances, have a budget, Make one and follow!! Set your targets e.g, I want to get to 150lb bench press, 200lb squat, e.t.c, or I want to have 3k in my bank account in the next one year. These set a focus point in your mind and you can always use that as you go along to remind you of your reasons.
4. Assess and Enhance
Very few people get to this point. You have reached the end of the list, or you are somewhere and realize that your progress has slowed down considerably or stopped. It is time to assess the situation. Following the script is good in the sense that you don’t have to think much about anything. You have divided your time between thinking and executing. Somehow, this makes it so much easier to execute and follow. Any shortcomings you find as you go along should be used to improve your plan, not to be added adhoc in your activities. Add it to the plan and stick with the plan. The plan should be the single source of activity in your endeavors. That way, you will know what works and what doesn’t. When you reach the end of the list or gain some achievement, enjoy your success. Take time to cement your achievement and celebrate it. Congratulate yourself, then prepare for the next level of activity.
Conclusion
There is so much to say for each of those steps above. However, it can be as simple as written, without much thought, since I found out that most insight comes as you move along those steps. If this article excites you and makes you want to do something, let me see you in the comments. And I wish you success in all you do.