Kindle Notes & Highlights
“There’s one piece of advice that I have for you,” she said. “I’ve seen a lot of things happen here, a lot of stories. Keep a date night for yourselves. You have to keep your relationship strong.”
“Get out there and get to work!” So, I decided to write a book about working hard, nonsense-free.
My entire experience has confirmed my belief that it’s critical to have a strong why to guide the actions and directions we pursue in life.
AMRAP is an acronym commonly used in the fitness industry that stands for: As Many Reps As Possible. In brief, it’s a circuit-type workout where a stopwatch tells you how long you have to work, but you determine how hard you work. Here’s a quick example: push-ups on your floor for one minute—as many reps as possible, AMRAP one minute. If you can get more than forty, I’m impressed.
The AMRAP Mentality is broken down into five parts: Know Your Why Focus On What You Can Control Work Hard Shift Gears Re-Evaluate
AMRAP in particular is a specific kind of workout that, when performed correctly, gets a maximum effect for minimal time.
Another way to phrase the main idea might be, “performance on demand,” or, “performance under pressure.”
Consider this brief office example: you are assigned a project in which you must produce an important sales presentation targeting a big potential client. Management was surprised that they were able to land this opportunity…and now you only have a few hours to do it! You need to AMRAP those slides! And just like the push-ups, you better not do them recklessly! You must act quickly but maintain control.
Consider the effect: it’s easy to burn through twenty minutes by wandering around the gym, or swiping around on Facebook, or engaging in any other time waster that is at our fingertips on the Internet. But within the AMRAP Mentality—combining a deadline, a focused work goal, competition with others, and competition with yourself—it’s astounding what you can accomplish in five, ten, or twenty minutes. Imagine an hour?
Your why is the foundation and fuel of the AMRAP Mentality. Hard work and focus are the heart of it, but the why builds the base. This basic structure, in which we establish work capacity goals within small chunks of time and add the pressure of deadlines and competition, is a powerful tool. It makes focus not just a skill, but a necessity. Focus is automatic when you set up the right conditions. And having a strong why will help refine your focus.
The AMRAP Mentality is a toolset for getting hard, serious work done well and done quickly, but if you aren’t really sure why you are doing something or you really don’t want it badly enough, it won’t work. Without a strong why it is challenging to succeed.
If your goal is to become a CrossFit Games champion—great, I love it! That’s a great goal that demands years of hard, focused work and stressful competition. Are you ready to give up nearly everything in your life to win? Are you ready to train early, train late, train sick, train on vacation, train on holidays? Does it pull at your soul when you’re not training? Does it make you ill that someone, somewhere is working harder than you? My point is that your why has to be so immense that you not only do all the hard, painful work, day after day, but are also willing to make sacrifices on a
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Again, the source of your strength and focus, the fuel that powers your actions, is a strong why. For me, the why was a simple one: I had to succeed because I wanted to take care of my family. I had no other choice. Simply being able to put food on the table for my wife and kids and provide good health insurance were just a few of the many reasons I had to make it work.
To achieve next-level focus, you must tune out the noise of things you can’t control and dial in to what really matters. Guess what sorts of people tend to worry about things they can’t control? People who often lose.
Instead, focus on what you can control.
This step is where the AMRAP Mentality can help you hone your ability to identify the things you can affect and separate them from the things you can’t. Before we can apply the next steps, we need to be able to fiercely and intelligently assess what we can control.
Good ol’ reliable, old-school hard work is the currency of the AMRAP Mentality. It’s a blue-collar type of attitude. There’s a job to be done—so do it. It’s not about searching out secret hacks and shortcuts. It’s about being focused and putting in your best effort to accomplish the things that need to be accomplished. There’s no mystery about hard work. It’s work and it’s hard. The important thing to realize is that with a strong why, you will have the energy, determination, and reason to put in the daily hard work required to get where you want to go. When your why is right…the work is
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It is natural to have days where you feel less motivated than others. The trick on those days is to rely on your why, and on the momentum from the good days. Your bigger vision will power you, so that you continue to the necessary hard work.
Being able to survey your progress and toggle between gears is the fourth key aspect of the AMRAP Mentality. I have found it almost impossible to remain truly focused on one thing for an entire day—your brain and body need time to recharge and switch things up.
At work, be at work…at home, be at home with your family. Shift between gears and remain focused during that time, once the gear is shifted you are no longer worried about the past gear or future gear…focus is on the current gear. From my experience, most people have three gears. The first is maintaining good relationships with family and close friends; the second is aimed at some way to provide for yourself and your loved ones; and third is usually a hobby and/or passion to pursue.
Focus, our second aspect, is essential if we are going to switch between gears and continue to stay on task. It's a waste of energy to jump back and forth between things you can't control.
But if you think you can just get by working as hard as you can without any particular direction…you are wrong, my friend. This is a recipe for recklessness and eventual (and inevitable) disaster. No matter what, without your why or without the journey toward your why, the energy needed to focus and the capacity for hard work are not going to be there for you long…if at all. You must identify your why.
Knowing your deepest purpose is like paying attention to yourself in a very honest and sincere way.
I had a plan, and I executed it with precision.
I needed to work at all times to keep everything together. My day was packed—and I loved it.
The truth was that, even though six solid months of good grades at a community college was a fine start, my efforts fell far short of eclipsing years of poor performance in high school. I can look back now and laugh—did I really think six months would be enough? The reality was, I had a debt to pay off. The years of sitting on my hands added up, and I was “in the red.” There was no shortcut around it. It was a good lesson. You have to be honest about the work you need to do to go where you want to go.
Whether I knew it or not at the time, my why was clarifying my life goals, who I was, and what I stood for.
As I mentioned earlier, some of the most effective physical training produces a tremendous amount of hard work within a short period of time. I learned from this impactful process in the gym and applied it to other areas of my life. To this day, I do almost all of my workouts against a stopwatch. If you ask me to work out…you better believe we are going “for time.”
It was crystal clear to me that I would one day open my own business. I didn’t know when or what, but I knew why.
In Silicon Valley, the real estate market can be pretty unforgiving, especially for first-time buyers. So, in order for us to get married and begin building our future, I needed to set my standards high when it came to income and saving. My resolve to reach my goals strengthened, and I tapped into a source of energy and drive that gave me the discipline to face the daily grind. After all, the grind was necessary if I wanted to achieve the things I really wanted.
This is the reason your why needs to be bigger than simply, “I want to make a lot of money.” In order for your why to drive you in the right direction, it needs to be soulful and in tune with your core values. If you’re off track, you are potentially heading for disaster.
I was fascinated by CrossFit’s ability to get more work done in less time…exactly the approach that had saved me in community college.
An essential component of CrossFit is the idea that its practitioners make up a community. This is where it differed from what I had experienced at regular gyms. Rather than a system of buyers and sellers of memberships, it provides a close-knit network of people who understand that they are all in this together. This amazing sense of community combined with sharing the experience of hard work is the true driver of CrossFit’s amazing results.
The first step to owning a gym business was finding the right location.
While it is okay to start a business in an industry that you don’t understand, it is not okay to not do your due diligence and actually learn the industry.
Due diligence in business, looked at through the lens of the AMRAP Mentality, is all about ensuring you have the appropriate amount of industry knowledge needed to succeed and are focusing on the things that matter. Invest in what you know and focus on what you can control. What are the things you can you control? You control effort. You control attitude. You control time management. You control fiscal responsibility. You control who you choose to work with and where you choose to sell your product. You control your level of preparation. But most importantly, you control your own actions and
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When you take on an important project that requires direct experience and knowledge that you don’t have, preparation is the only solution. You have to prepare as thoroughly as possible, and part of that preparation is finding the right experts and mentors to draw upon for knowledge. That knowledge will enable you to avoid fatal errors—like
Every second was precious. Everything I did had a sense of urgency. My why was incredibly strong, and I gave it my all.
“Work so hard that it’s impossible to fail,” was what mentors had taught me, and I intended to do exactly that. I think of that mantra to this day.
The CrossFit Games require athletes to spend a tremendous amount of time in what is lovingly known as the “pain cave.”
Oddly enough, when I won the CrossFit Games in 2008, the theme for the competition was “Every Second Counts.” I had this phrase tagged on the wall in that first gym. When it went up, I didn’t think of it as anything more than cool art. Little did I know that this phrase would become an important element of my mindset.
When I was training, I would think solely about training. When I was with my wife and kids, I would be 100% invested in them and our time together. When it was time to do business, I was committed to excelling as a businessman. I asked myself, no matter what I was working on, Am I really going for as many reps as possible here? Am I getting in as much work as possible on this one task?
The ability to be really and truly present is a unique skill. Like any skill it takes time and practice to master.
The ability to be present without distraction is essential to mastering the AMRAP Mentality. It is also the piece of the mentality that I need to practice and remain aware of every single day.
Applying the focus element of the AMRAP Mentality is easy in theory, but in practice can actually be quite difficult—which is why I am constantly working on this skill. It boils down to the following: at work, be at work and work; at home, be at home and focus on your home life; and when you are working out, get after it and then move on to other things. The concept is simple, but the execution takes practice and constant reflection. Evaluate yourself with a brutal honesty. How present actually are you?
One of the most crucial factors in developing next-level focus involves emotional control. The most critical error I see people make in business, competition, and relationships is the tendency to lose control of their emotions when the heat starts to rise or when they are faced with adversity. Winners stay calm and channel that stress into productive energy. Losers complain, fly off the handle, and lose their cool. In my experience, this comes down to a fault in focus. And it begs the question…are you focused on the right things? Or, do you tend to focus on the things that you can’t control?
When you are able to focus on what is in your control—and push away the things you can’t change—you can turn almost any situation around.
Instead of, “Jason, your legs hurt…” I shift the focus away from the pain and fatigue to sentiments that benefit me, like, “Woo! My legs are burning. It feels like they are growing. Good. Getting stronger.” Sometimes I think of it as coaching someone. Those of you who have coached or motivated someone: you would never say something like, “Your legs hurt. You probably can’t breathe. You shouldn’t even be here.” You would say, “Nice work! Keep moving! You’re getting so strong! Your movement looks great!” And so on.
THE ONLY REAL-LIFE HACK…WORK REALLY HARD
When people ask me what my secret is, I’m always a little embarrassed by how simple it sounds. I often respond with, “It’s not a secret at all…I just worked really hard for many, many years.”
