Hello there!
Hope your weekend is going well. Mine seems to be. I added one more moka pot to my collection of moka pots - every 2 years, my variation of drinking coffee seems to shift around. From drip coffee, it has been moka pot for quite some time now. I wonder what’s next.
For today, here’s what I have in store.
on useful binary thinking. Many times, binary thinking limits us. It is almost never 0 or 1. But when we are inundated with choices, when we are wishy-washy and not moving forward, binary thinking becomes useful.
3 quotes, including “Normal is a distribution, not a person.”
on zero-sum thinking and healthy competition. Almost nothing around is needs to be a zero-sum game. But maybe remnants from our youth or seeing zero-sum conversations all around us, we tend to veer over there. Unnecessarily.
I’d love it if you would share ONE of my posts with ONE friend of yours. Thank you!
on useful binary thinking
on balance and moderation
Moderation is hard. If you are trying to get to your goals and you've been more unsuccessful than successful so far, binary thinking is a better approach for you in the short term.
A sustainable, balanced lifestyle is the dream. But if you had been doing that, then you wouldn't be here today. It is because you sat too much, ate too many chips, drank too much juice, inhaled too much biriyani, watched TV instead of sleeping etc that we are having this conversation.
reinforce the goal daily
You wake up today and tell yourself that you will go to the gym, or if that fails, you will go on a walk. You make a decision that you will not eat sugar today. Done!
Stick to the plan for today.
Tomorrow is another day and you can set your goal and reinforce it in the morning.
If today is a special day (birthday in the family, seeing a buddy after ages etc), then you can plan that goal-setting in the morning accordingly. You will eat a gargantuan salad for lunch, you will get your workout in and then you will head out and have fun and eat lots of cake and drink lots of beer.
And tomorrow, you will come back and go to "NO" to everything. And do that for a few days to balance out the excesses of that special day.
just one bite, please ...
The issue arises when you tell yourself it is just one bite of cake or just a few bits of chips and what-not. You are not skilled enough or responsible enough to do that. So, just stop with it!
These things add up. More than you realise. The only other way is to maintain a diligent food journal about all of it and ensure that they don't actually add up.
And you are measuring what you need to measure daily/weekly/monthly right?
If you are doing enough of the right things, then the measurements will move in the right direction.
The issue with a bite of cake here, a piece of candy there and all that is you think you are doing enough of the right thing but the scale is not moving in the right direction. And you blame me (or your gym or whatever) for not being good enough. When the issue is simply one of you not being honest with yourself about your actions and goals.
no moderation for you
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.
– Richard Feynman
You (obviously) are not lying intentionally. You (obviously) are not trying to fool yourself. But you are. And it is much easier to blame someone else than yourself when results are not where they should be.
So, just stuff it with the moderation game. You will get there someday. But maybe not today.
For now, binary thinking works. Yes or No. No means no. No does not mean "a little bit".
Do what you need to do. Measure. Do more/better.
You'll get there. It might just take much longer than you think. But you will get there.
3 quotes
A simple rule for life and work:
Don’t rush, but don’t wait.
Thoughtful action.
– James Clear
If you don't subscribe to James Clear's 3-2-1, I highly recommend it. It is a quick read but one you should spend a few minutes (at least) thinking about.
Because when it comes to people, normal is an artificial construct, the center of a statistical bell curve but not a standard that we ought to seek to achieve, even if we could.
Normal is a distribution, not a person.
– Seth Godin
Seth Godin is amongst the smartest communicators I've read/listened to.
A goal is not always meant to be reached. It often serves simply as something to aim at.
– Bruce Lee
When we set lofty goals and fail, we become discouraged and disillusioned. But the journey is the destination - and picking a lofty destination can elevate us. By making us push ourselves out of our comfort zone. So, rewiring success can come in handy. This can be difficult though - we cannot set ourselves up to fail arbitrarily by seeking unrealistic goals. At the same time, setting low goals cannot push us.
on zero-sum thinking
what is zero-sum thinking?
Zero-sum thinking perceives situations as zero-sum games, where one person's gain would be another's loss.
Most sports are zero-sum games. If you win, I lose.
Possibly due to the exposure of sports all around us and these zero-sum games being persistent in our periphery, we tend to have a zero-sum bias. Meaning we look at most things as a zero-sum game.
This is hugely detrimental to our goals, to our motivations and to our progress.
comparing ourselves
I see students of mine being angry or annoyed when they see their batch mates lift heavier than them. I've known several people to quit their training because they felt inadequate with the numbers they put up. While I'd like to take some of this on me - I can communicate better about what is StrongEnough for them and how that is not the same as for someone else - I do wonder how many of these I miss out on.
As kids, it was an unfortunate but common practice to compare and be compared. Parents would remark how that kid got so many marks or was so smart or so diligent with their homework. Kids weren't much better - my friend's parents got him Nikes, so you need to get me one.
This seemingly harmless (?!?) practice seems to play some part in our zero-sum thinking/bias.
the purpose of any competition
I think one purpose of competing is to elevate ourselves and our performance. Whether it is at an elite level or at our level (of playing badminton with our friends or whatever), we are there to push our abilities to the maximum. And therein find the joy of a sort of maximising our physical and mental capabilities for that short window.
But from our youth, this baggage of comparison seems to instil in us a weird sense of destructive competition.
Finding someone who's just a bit better than us can provide us with the challenge to elevate ourselves. Playing a game of shuttle where even if you end up losing, you played way better than any game you've ever played before. The competitor elevated you. Isn't that great?
You played better than you probably have.
That's not a zero-sum game. But if we look at it as they won and you lost, then it becomes a zero-sum game.
big fish in a small pond
If you were looking at whether you improved, whether you elevate your performance, whether you had fun - it becomes something else.
When someone in your peer group, say in your fitness class, squats the gigantic 32 kg bells, instead of comparing yourself or wishing they were not that strong - what you should instead take away from that is the creation of possibility. If someone else, rather similar to you, can do it, then so can you.
Many times, some kettlebells seem prohibitively big to me. But then, someone else in The Quad Squad will lift it and in a few weeks or months, I'll lift it. Until then, I would have put my ceiling below it because well, I didn't know it could be done. Squatting bodyweight or pressing half-bodyweight seemed possible only when I realised that there were a lot of people in the StrongFirst community who were doing it.
What's the point of being a big fish in a small pond? And when you aren't, you just move ponds?!
community and healthy competition
I think having a support group is important - an intentional community like Coach Dan John says. Your batchmates are your competition, absolutely. Having someone else who can squat 20 kilos more than you shows you that it can be done. You can learn from her, how to elevate your performance. You can chat with him about what (all) habits he has in place and his own journey to getting to where you want to be. Someone else has solved this problem for you - you can learn from them.
It can be a healthy competition, where the point is not winning or losing. But elevating ourselves.
Or it can be stupid and creating a zero-sum game where none exists. You win, or they win.
I know what I'd like to teach in my class.
Thanks for reading/listening. If you have anything you’d like to share, just reply back. I’d love to hear from you.
