A Guide to Getting Fit
There are plenty of areas in my life where I struggle to do what I say I want to do. Exercise isn’t one of them.
My fiancée and I recently started going to a new gym together. She has a long history with sports – basketball, soccer, tennis. I’m something of a gym rat.
What’s new isn’t fitness itself, but doing it together. And watching our two approaches side by side has made something obvious: our cultural approach to fitness is backwards.
Most people evaluate themselves against where they want to be, not where they are.
Do you want to lose 10 pounds?
Want to be able to do 10 pull-ups?
Those are fine goals, but terrible motivators because the only question you end up asking is “Am I there yet?”
If the answer is no – and it usually is – your motivation becomes self-criticism.
A better approach is to evaluate only one thing: What did you do today?
Outcomes like weight loss or pull-ups are what James Clear calls lagging indicators. What actually drives progress are the leading indicators – the tiny actions that move you in the right direction.
The process is simple:
- Don’t measure yourself against the future.
- Only measure yourself against what you’ve done today.
- If you’ve taken even one small step towards the outcome you want, celebrate that success.
If your goal is to lose weight, did you eat a little better than yesterday? Did you exercise today?
If your goal is to do pull-ups, did you hang from the bar? Did you try for one?
If the answer is yes, celebrate!
At the gym, everything counts as success for me. Showing up is a success. Falling out of a handstand is success. Being sore the next day is success.
My bar for winning is so low that I always win, and that framing makes consistency inevitable.
I was talking about this recently with my friend M’Gilvry — a professional musician who will be performing at the Snafu Conference in March — and we noticed the same pattern across disciplines.
For M’Gilvry, a missed note doesn’t register as failure. It’s part of practicing and practicing is the win.
But we were relating that in other disciplines like writing or sales, we both move the goalposts impossibly far away.
If I don’t write 1,000 words, it wasn’t a good writing day.
If M’Gilvry doesn’t close a sale, the effort leading up to that feels wasted.
Same work. Different definition of success.
As we head into the busiest fitness month of the year, my advice is simple: set your goalposts closer.
Measure yourself against what you did today, not the outcome you hope to achieve.
3 Things I’ve Loved This Week
I went to see Cirque du Soleil this weekend, and afterwards I got curious about some of the world-class jugglers and circus performers I used to know.
I first saw Cirque circa 2002, just after I discovered gymnastics, and it left a big impression. Around the same time, I had the pleasure of seeing Michael Moschen live.
Moschen, a high school classmate of Penn Jillette's, invented the field of contact juggling and received the MacArthur “Genius Grant” in 1990.
This video is an incredible demonstration of his creativity, acting, and perfect form.
I stumbled across this hilarious book in early January and finished it in a matter of two days. Written by Wired contributor Cody Cassidy, the book seeks to answer the question, "How would you survive at specific, challenging moments throughout history?"
Cassidy pulls both modern science to discuss the cons of, for example, being a low-body fat male in the Donner Party, and from hindsight to give a third-class passenger on the Titanic the most likely escape route to get on a lifeboat before things get out of control.
Each story is told with a pragmatic eye to survival in unlikely circumstances, but told with gallows humor and playfulness that I found enthralling.
I’m halfway through his previous book And Then You're Dead: What Really Happens If You Get Swallowed by a Whale, Are Shot from a Cannon, or Go Barreling Over Niagara.
Quote I’m considering: "When people feel uncertain, they'd rather have someone strong and wrong, than someone weak and right." -Bill Clinton
I’ve had this quote on a note card on my desk for the last few weeks. It is pretty dark, but I also think it is true.
It echoes Winston Churchill's sentiment that "Americans will always do the right thing, only after they have tried everything else.”
Want more?
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The Snafu Conference is an immersive 1-day experience about authentic selling in a chaotic world. The summit is next week, so this is your last chance to join us!
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Until next week,
Robin
