Good morning!
Hope you are having a good weekend so far. If not, there’s still time for you to do something fun - read a book, curl up and watch a movie, order a pizza, grab a beer with a buddy, go on a drive. Even if it is just 30 minutes doing what you want to do, it will brighten up your day. Do it!
Right after I publish this, I am going to play around at the gym. An hour of that and I feel refreshed.
On to the 3 things for today.
on shiny objects and how they are useful and necessary
on swimming in the winter in Calcutta
on waking up early. Should you?
on shiny objects
You've been training with kettlebells and suddenly you hear from your friend about how barbells are just so much better. And you want to shift to barbell training.
You've been eating your traditional foods and tweaking your plate to include more vegetables and less grain. But then someone tells you about how the paleo diet is the answer to everything you've always dreamed of. And you obviously want to shift to a paleo diet.
Yes, they can derail us and confuse us.
Shiny objects can derail us.
Shiny objects can confuse us, even when we are on the right path.
Shiny objects can make us spin our wheels more.
But they can also help us find our start. Sometimes we keep looking for something to check all the boxes. That almost never happens. Searching for ‘perfect’ is just another way to procrastinate. Two ways I’ve used shiny objects - CrossFit and going gluten-free are listed below.
something fun. And more importantly, I needed to find something fun to do. I needed something that would make me jump out of bed. Something I would look forward to everyday. That's how I found CrossFit. Not a long-term solution for me but for close to 2 years, it was an integral part of my life. And continues to be one of my best experiences.
If I had researched CrossFit and listened to the nay-sayers (and CrossFit does get a lot of things wrong), I might never be in the career I am in today.
or a slap in the face. That's how I found going gluten-free and sugar-free more than a decade ago. It was an abrupt change in how I was going about things. I needed to drastically change how I was eating. This worked so much better than a sustainable change for me - it made me realise I had the willpower to do this. It also made me re-think my diet i.e. it actually made me think about what I was eating.
Sure, long-term the point is to be sustainable. But I found that out only by snapping out of my unhealthy habits.
Don’t dismiss shiny objects.
on swimming in the winter
A few years ago, I was in Calcutta in late December. The hotel we were staying at had a swimming pool and I am not great at swimming, and so was looking forward to some inefficient exercise to burn of all the nolen gur baked rosogulla that I was eating.
I woke up around 5ish and swam for the better part of an hour. I seemed to have an audience though, as whenever I stopped and gasped for breath, I could feel eyes on me. And I'd look around and see some of the hotel staff looking at me from one of the various floors. Until my friend (who’s from Calcutta) told me that I was nuts to go swimming in the winter over there and they’d never done it all their life.
Until then, it never struck me. In my hometown of Madras, much further to the south, the concept of winter is, well, just a concept. While I've lived in places with severe winters, it was just that I did not think about it when I decided to wake up and go swimming.
And in not thinking, in not letting that get in the way, I was actually being rather smart.
I am not advocating that we park our brains aside. I am simply saying that our thoughts and perceptions and “this is the way things should be done” are unnecessary constraints.
Why do we let thoughts and perceptions and other people's limitations limit us? Well, for one, it prevents us from doing silly things.
But it also prevents us from doing extraordinary things.
It prevents us from doing things we are capable of.
Constraints are just that - constraints. Don't build them up too much in your heads.
To not let my previous thoughts and opinions cloud my judgment on what is possible and what's not.
Our minds and bodies are capable of a lot more. Most times, it is the thinking that gets in the way.
Take 5 minutes. Think of one thing where you did something rather out of the ordinary only to later second-guess yourself and stop doing it.
Break the shackles.
on waking up early
Should you? Do you battle with this near-daily? And get annoyed because you are not waking up early. But why?
If it doesn’t work for you, it doesn’t.
While there are health benefits to going to bed early and getting a good night's sleep, as well as starting the day early - you should do what works for you. Instead of saying "I should wake up early", how about you think about you making your day's structure work for you? Maybe you like getting work done at a different time of the day. Maybe you like to get your activity done at the end of the day - after sitting all day and exercising your brain, you just want to get out and work your stress out.
Do what works for you. There is no should.
There are enough and more big rocks for us to focus on. While waking up early is healthy and blah blah blah, so’s eating vegetables and so is being active and all that. Do something else.
Don't force-fit yourself into other people's rules. Feel your way through it.
I was never an early-morning person until I joined CrossFit - I'd train at 6 am and so would wake up around 5.30 am. And let me tell you, 5.30 am on a cold San Francisco day is not a walk in the park. But it was made much easier because I was obsessed with CrossFit and would jump out of bed when my alarm rang. After a couple of months though, I'd go through a phase where I would shift my training to the evenings. Just coz I felt like I needed to sleep in more. But what was constant was that I was going to my classes 5-6 days a week. As long as that was happening, why did it matter what time I woke up.
It didn't.
Look at the larger picture. What are you trying to get done? Get that done. Don't forget that.
It can be liberating to not think of “I should do this.” and funnily, once you stop and you just be yourself, things change. It is weird how sometimes not forcing it is how you make it happen.
And that’s it from me. Thanks for reading and listening. And if you shared one of the posts with ONE person, you made my day.
