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You can’t grow unless you watch yourself do the work. You can’t get better unless you judge your effort against what you know it should look like, in your heart and in your mind.
It’s no harder to think big than it is to think small. The only hard part is giving yourself permission to think that way.
There is value and meaning in doing hard work for its own sake, don’t get me wrong, but the real reason is so that when the moment arrives for your dream to come true and for your vision to become real … you don’t flinch and you don’t falter.
Reps build strength, but pain builds size.
What about time for rest and relaxation? First of all, rest is for babies and relaxation is for retired people. Which one are you?
The Stoics have a term for this: amor fati. Love of fate. “Do not seek for things to happen the way you want them to,” the great Stoic philosopher and former slave Epictetus said. “Rather, wish that what happens happen the way it happens. Then you will be happy.”
The beauty of weight lifting is that failure is baked into the practice. The whole goal in weight lifting is to work your muscles to failure, which we sometimes forget. When you can’t squeeze out that last rep or lock out those elbows before dropping the weight, it’s not uncommon to feel a flash of frustration, but then you have to remember that your failure on that particular lift doesn’t mean you’ve lost somehow. It actually means that your workout was a good one, that your muscles were fully fatigued. It means you did the work.
Important, interesting, powerful people are drawn to those who ask good questions and listen well. When you’re curious and you’re humble enough to admit that you don’t know everything, people like that want to talk to you. They want to help you.
The more I learned, and the more questions I asked of the people who were teaching me, the more I understood how things were connected and the better leader I became.
Use it or lose it is the rule with ripe fruit, political goodwill, media attention, coupons, economic opportunity, space to pass on the highway, all sorts of things. But most importantly, it’s true of the knowledge you soak up over your lifetime. If you don’t regularly flex your mind like a muscle and put your knowledge to work, it will eventually lose its power.
use it or lose it
Curiosity. Hunger for information. Being open-minded. Putting your knowledge to good use. This, it turns out, is a formula for anyone to create real, meaningful change in the world, whether it’s personal, professional, or political.
what you need to make meaningful change
