What I’ve Learned So Far

Sunday’s workout was okay — squats, bench presses, and lots of stretching. Overall, though, February has been a hollow month for me in terms of fitness: a few workouts, but no consistent progress, and I’m nowhere near the goals I set out for myself.

It’s not like the frustration is gnawing away at me, but it has led me to think more about Dave Tate’s advice on pursuing one’s real priorities, plus my own advice for sticking with a workout program.

Here’s what struck me: plenty of people, myself included, “work out” regularly — often without ever hitting any particular milestone. Or, if they hit a milestone, it’s an oh-by-the-way side effect of what they’ve been doing, rather than the fruit of a cherished or methodical pursuit.

Contrast this to how the winter Olympians we’re watching every night train for years on end to achieve a particular goal. I’ve been struck by how many of the competitors have said, both before and after finding out whether they won, that they’re happy with the outcome regardless because they know that they have trained as hard as they could and then given their absolute best effort in competition.

My goal now is to go back to the drawing board to decide (a) what I want to train for, and (b) how I’m going to go about it.

What are you training for?

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(Image by snakemanrob, used under a CC-Noncommercial license.)

If you want to be successful, you will rearrange your priorities, and put your focus where it belongs: on the one thing you want to obtain. Results will follow.

–Dave Tate, powerlifter and fitness entrepreneur

Be advised: the page just linked has foul language, plus a gory picture of a soldier’s arm after it got shredded by a bomb in Afghanistan. If that doesn’t put you off, the story of the soldier’s recovery and return to powerlifting is an inspiring one.

That’s a picture of Tate on the right. His philosophy is uncompromising both because that’s how he’s wired, and because that’s what has worked to make him successful as a strength athlete and a businessman. As he says elsewhere, “I don’t do moderation.”

You can find out more about Tate, and sample from his highly knowledgeable but frequently R-rated observations on strength training and life, via TMuscle, EliteFTS, and the “One Movement” series of weightlifting videos.

Real training means committing to the process: showing up at the keyboard or behind the lens or in the ring or on the rope, and doing it religiously, even when you’re tired, even when you’ve got nothing to say, even when it’s too cold, too hot, too hard.

People wish they had talent. They see it as a practice-free ticket to crowd-stunning skill. But talent doesn’t exist. “Talent” doesn’t get results; practice and devotion do.

–Scott Semple

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Updated, Thursday evening: Thanks to Semple himself for providing the link to the original — I’ve corrected it above. I originally came across his essay “The Talent Myth” on the Gym Jones site.

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(Photo by lecercle, used under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.)

In case it’s not obvious, I’m the ‘thinky’ type. In my line(s) of work, being smart and intellectual is like being athletically gifted and skilled in sports.

But being athletically gifted, and even being highly skilled, aren’t enough to dictate success on the playing field. The best competitors, regardless of sport, are those who have the best combination of athleticism, skill, and other qualities — psychological qualities — to help them succeed.

Sometimes, great physical attributes come together with great mental attributes, and you get Pele or Tiger Woods or Donald Bradman or Pete Sampras. But many of the greatest sports heroes were notable more for their mental attributes — especially tough-mindedness — than for their physical gifts. (Case in point: Jerry Rice.)

The more I travel through this life, the more I come to believe that talent is a shallow attribute. Great, the kid is a talented Little Leaguer. Great, the marketing VP is really smart. It doesn’t mean much until you see how those talents play out — how the person puts them to use — and that relies much more on mental approach to the task than it does to talent for the task.

So, for now I’ll just say that I’m working on my mental toughness, and doing it methodically. In a later post, I’ll spell out my approach.

What do you think? Is mental toughness as important as I make it out to be?

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(Photo source.)

Bulletin: it’s just as disorienting to the drivers around you when you go super-duper slow as when you go super-duper fast.

Twice in the past two days I’ve had drivers in front of me nearly foul up the works for me and others because they went through small intersections a good 10 m.p.h. slower than most folks would.

As I tell my kids, who are still years away from driving age: be predictable when you’re driving.

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Related:

• In which I begin to vent my traffic peeves, starting with the use of parking lights.

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It’s been raining a lot in Austin lately — and thank goodness, because we’ve had an awful drought this year.

But the rain has exposed me, again and again, one of my traffic peeves. I refer to the use of parking lights when headlights are called for.

People, it’s simple:

• If you’re parked somewhere and need to indicate that your car is occupied — for example, in a loading zone — use your parking lights.
• If your car is moving and you need any lights, use your HEADlights.

Really, it’s not that hard, is it?

A note: I intend to vent a few more of my peeves here, but understand that I’m also willing to consider alternate good explanations — UNLIKELY AS THEY MIGHT BE — for doing the things that peeve me. To put it another way, I’m willing to revise my biases, IF you’re willing to lead me down that road.

Be aware that it will take some doing.

Anyone want to stand up for using parking lights instead of headlights when your car is moving?

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(Parking light photo; headlight photo.)

I loved to watch Tony Gwynn hit, and it was clear early on that we were watching a hitter who was historically good at hitting for a high average.

But for all his ebullience, intelligence, and skill, he was a deeply flawed player, and by the end of his career he was so hefty that his frequent absences from the Padres lineup came as no surprise.

I’m thinking about all of this because of a bookmark I just ran across — one I’ve had lying around for a long time — for a 2004 Baseball Prospectus roundtable about Ichiro Suzuki’s (successful) pursuit of the single-season hits record.

The discussion includes a key quote from Gary Huckabay, whom I have the pleasure of knowing slightly:

Discipline isn’t manifested through compulsive and repetitive execution of those tasks which you enjoy, like cage time and video study. It’s manifested through the diligent repetition of those tasks you don’t like–in the case of Mr. Gwynn, cardio workouts, weightlifting and proper nutrition–so that you’re in a position to perform the entirety of your required task set at the highest possible level. The final years of Gwynn’s career were a pathetic waste, plagued by excessive fragility and impaired defense, primarily because of miserable conditioning.

It’s a thought worth transferring to other fields. We all know people who obsess over the things that appeal to them, but don’t tackle the set of challenges required to achieve their best. Gwynn ended his career with more than 3,100 hits, but given his Olympian skill at hitting and how long he played, even such a big number seems hollow.

I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to guess how I’m applying this lesson to myself.

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(Photo by Brian Wallace, used under a Creative Commons Noncommercial license.)

Well, no wonder . . . The stack of notes and to-do’s I’ve been carrying around contains, by an actual count just now, 213 pieces of paper. This doesn’t include four stapled articles to read, or the spiral notebook, or the draftwork on my desk, or the dozen documents on my computer’s desktop, or what’s in my three inboxes, or what’s tucked into my file drawers . . . you get the idea.

A good news/bad news addendum to this: it’s not as bad as it was. (Note that the picture above is not actually a picture of my desk.)

What I’m doing about it:

• Discarding outright. Applying the Pareto principle, you have to figure that the bottom half or two-thirds of this material just isn’t worth much. So I’m trying to save only the stuff that Pareto, Covey, Williams, and Hamming would agree is worthwhile.
• Consolidating notes. For many of these pages, there are only a few relevant items left to think about. So I’m piling them all into one big active list, and discarding the rest.
• Writing my way through everything. As I’ve explained recently, I’m working to improve my daily production of words. There’s a lot of material in these notes that feeds various professional projects and pieces of writing I want to finish. And meanwhile, the process of working through all of it may feed some posts here; I give plenty of abstract advice on “living richly,” but this is definitely a chance to work through things concretely.
• Turning off my intake. Some new things are bound to come in, but I’m gearing up for vacation soon, and I think that turning off the information spigot between now and then will allow me to carve into the backlog nicely.
• Begging forebearance. My inboxes have piled up, and I’ve been hanging fire on a couple of key projects — some of the big timber at the front of the logjam. So, if you’re waiting on something from me, I beg a little more patience from you.

Now I’m off to sharpen my ax . . .

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(Photo by kris krüg, used under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.)

I’ve railed against multitasking many times. I’ve talked plenty about focus. And yet these are things I struggle with daily. Maybe you do, too?

The problem with multitasking is that it divides our energies in too many directions. Instead of bringing all our “weight” (talent, attention, focus) to a single task, we spread it around. Dividing your eggs among different baskets can be a good idea if you’re using portfolio theory to invest for retirement or build a better ballclub. It’s a bad idea if you’re trying to knock out important projects.

Set aside the reasons why we do this (fear, laziness, bad habits). The important thing is that we stop doing it.

What could you do today to make sure you have both feet on the scale — to make sure you’re putting all your weight into the projects that mean the most to you?

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(Photo by Andrew Walsh, used under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license.)

Those who are enlightened
never stop forging themselves.
The realizations of such masters cannot be
expressed well in words or by theories.
The most perfect actions
echo the patterns found in nature.

–Morihei Ueshiba

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(Image via Wikipedia.)