Fitness

This is a New Beginning for you. The beginning of a story is so pivotal to both those reading and telling the story. As an author, you have to introduce characters and make them matter. For a reader, you choose to become invested in the story.

American author and forester Aldo Leopold wrote in his book A Sand County Almanac, that a forester, with each swing of his axe, is writing his signature on the land.

Essentially, what Mr. Leopold was saying is that we are accountable for our actions and we will be remembered for what we do and that our small, daily desicions have more impact than we may realize.

I believe that we as humans write our personal signature upon the world with the contraction and lengthening of our muscles. Think about it – every great moment in history only happened because someone willed their body to move. So when I talk about telling a story, I’m talking about moving and breathing.

That’s all Fitness is about: moving and breathing.

Sweat the Small Stuff

I like to sweat.

As a person who likes to workout and do physical things, that shouldn’t be surprising. Afterall, we do what we like.

But some people don’t like to sweat. It irritates them. It drips off their noses or into their eyes. It stinks.

They probably like to do other things. They just don’t want to sweat while they do it.

But it’s important to recognize effort – the effort you put into something has an affect on the outcome. If you don’t workout with sufficient vigor, you won’t see the desired gains. If you make plans and then cancel them, nothing happens.

Furthermore, most activities are not one and done. You don’t show up for your first day at the gym and win a strongman championship. You don’t read a paragraph of a book and know the whole story. You don’t generally meet someone and they become your best friend. Rather, it takes regular activity, concentrated effort, over a span of time for a greater outcome.

So, I’m asking you to expend more effort. Set a tone for your training and your life. Add intention to your regimen. I’m asking you to sweat, if only figuratively for now…

Sweat is a tangible metric by which expenditures can be measured. If there’s sweat on my shirt, I must have accomplished something. Right?

By what metric can you measure your own efforts? This is important, because if you expend enough effort, you will eventually be successful.

You need to be able to define what success looks like for you. Success is going to look a lot different for each person. Some people are going to have certain expectations about what it looks like at the end. If those expectations are unmet then there’s going to be contention and pain. So understanding the concept of Victory is really important.

We call it the Victory series but a lot of people confuse that as being the goal. Victory is not the end goal. You are going to achieve victory every time you overcome a challenge or learn a new thing. Some victories are going to be huge and others are going to be those small, daily victories but they all matter.

I probably won’t draw upon sports analogies very often. It’s just not my thing. But I want you think about a this: if you’re trying to win the game, you need to know how to score points. Luckily, most of winning is instinctive. It just makes sense. And also watching other people play the game will help you figure out the rules, avoid common mistakes, and learn new strategies for winning.

This is the path to Victory.