Weeknotes no.7 – it's simple, but not easy 🏋🏼♂️
if you go back and remember sports in school, it was highly unmotivating – at least for me. i wasn’t particularly “good” at whatever they were trying to make us do.
being in the early to mid-30s, it’s now easy to connect the dots looking backwards: it could’ve been very differently. what if this were set up to motivate us, get us to try different things? not everyone is gonna be great at the two or three things they are doing every year.
aside from school, cycling was always something i liked. also, i went to the gym on and off in phases. and then last year something clicked and i started spending more time training, with more structure, and therefore more results.
one of the things i heard early on (on tiktok, probably…) was: “it’s simple, but not easy”.
that kinda stuck.
the basic training philosophies and foundations are very simple. that’s something you can teach easily. the showing up every day is not.
“i wish i had that/your motivation” is one of my favorite quotes, because i’ve learned that it is so wrong. while motivation might be the thing that usually gets the ball rolling in the first place, discipline is the thing that keeps it moving.
Brad Stulberg – who btw has a couple of really good books – wrote in his recent one “The Way of Excellence”: “you’ve got to find joy in the work itself”. while that was said more broadly in the context of work, it perfectly applies to the gym as well.
if you have the discipline to keep moving, endure the long valleys of slow progress and play the long game, you’ll get there eventually. delayed gratification is the fancy phrase at play here.
and vice versa the gym also applies to everyday life: to get somewhere, you need to put in the work.
there’s no award for showing up to the gym, you need to do something while you’re there (the coffee lounge does not count!).
✌🏼
i’ll leave you with those thoughts this week.
go and do something with it next week (or not) 🙃