It's a long way to the top

It takes decades for sea turtles to reach sexual maturity. Lesson - good things can take a long time to develop. Yesterday, I read this article about a woman who completed her college degree in 19 years by doing one class a semester. 19 years is a long time to continue doing something, and I'm sure she had some doubts along the way.

Most things in life seem to boil down to parts.A- the decision to actually go through with something. B- seeing it through. There are more variables, but a good deal of the time the obstacles between the start and finish can be overcome. The decision to actually do something is a big hurdle. It's easy to talk ourselves out of something that will be difficult and long. Seeing it through is just usually a matter of working through the problems faced along the way.

Admittedly, most of my problems start by never getting past point A. Careers, women, purchasing a dog are all big decisions that require getting over a hump. Most of the time I probably roll back down. Crawl back into my teeny shell, and stay in my comfort zone.

What I learned

This little journey has kind of come to a weird conclusion. I would just like to recap some of the things I learned along the way. These are not all of the lessons, but they are some of the ones that stick out in my head.

1. Patience- This may be the most difficult thing to really achieve. I am still not patient, but I have learned that like most things it requires practice and confidence. For me patience really means "SLOW DOWN". I am still young, and I have a lot of things going in the right direction. My problems are trivial, and I'll figure things out. While I may have rushed into this trip, I don't need to rush into anything.

2. Do things- You can sit on your ass and think about what you wanna do, and you can tell people what your are going to do, but if you never actually do it your just kind of jerking off. The only expectations you have to live up to are your own and maybe the 15-20 people who have really vested interest in what you do. Those people really just want you to find something that makes you happy, they don't care if your a badass Navy SEAL, or a kindergarten teacher. You can talk about what you would be good at, but you have to try it to really find out. In the words of Yoda, "Do or do not, there is no try"

3. Focus- If you really want to be good at something it requires a long time. Deliberate practice and years of it will add up. Rod Stewart, before he pooped his pants, sang a great song about "wishing he knew then what he knows now". Well at leas I know that things take a lot of hard work. I still haven't really figured out what I want to "master", but I know I love to train, and play sports. When I do figure out what I want I'll try to get as good as I can.

4.Things are what you make them- This trip was going to be me hitting a bunch of Crossfit Gyms. I love Crossfit- style training, but I realize now that it is not the end all. Have fun doing what your doing, and make quality a big part of that. I came to Catalyst for many reasons, Olympic Lifting was one, but the biggest was the fact they kind of fell of the Crossfit bandwagon. Long story short their emphasis was on quality training, and some amount of individualization in program. Good business takes the individual into account. You can't just throw up a random "one-size fits all" model for everyone to follow. Every athlete has different needs. This is analogous to business and life in many ways. Further, pursuing quality in just about any endeavor can lead to success if you are truly concerned with your practice.

5.Pay attention- You can learn a lot if you just Look, and pay attention. Get the fuck off your iphone, puter, or whatever and just take things in every once in a while. It's amazing what you can figure out.

6. Life requires agression- You have to go out and get things. This seems contradictory to the first thing I learned, but life is one big contradiction. One of my favorite cues from Greg Everett is "you can't fuck around". The Olympic lifts are precise and violent. You can't phone them in. Most encounters in life require some amount of civil aggresion. Be courteous and respectful, but don't let others walk all over you.

7. Humility- somewhere there is someone working in a grocery store who is 5 times smarter than you. Be thankful for the opportunities your family has given you.

8. Living space matters- My brother, who is an architect, said to me, "you did everything right, except you messed up your living arrangement". Where I lived served its purpose, but I probably should have found a more hospitable home. Comfortable living can make loneliness a bit less lonely, and your life as a whole a lot better. I feel awful for people who don't have a safe place to sleep at night.

9. Be good to your family, and friends- you never know when your going to develop a cyst in your butt. Be thankful for the people that give a damn about you, and give a damn about them, because people are the only thing that really matter, besides maybe in-n-out.

Things I like

Oprah has her "Favorite things", and I have my "shit" I like. This the first installment, and it is brought to you by breakfast food. Breakfast is the first meal of the deal. You are literally "breaking the fast" so the heartier the better. Your body has rejuvenated itself by getting a healthy amount of rest, and depleted your fuel reserves. Sleep does the body good, and deep sleep has the ability to elicit human growth hormones along with other hormones that help you recover and get stronger. If you are training and eating properly good sleep can increase performance a great deal.

Breakfast is awesome. Mostly, because of the fact that any meal can become "breakfast", but only some foods are deemed "breakfast foods". In particular these are things like bacon, eggs, and the possibilty of other meats like sausage, or steak.

That's a pretty delicous mustache. Aside from the standard delivery system of some type of plate or bowl a tortilla can be used to wrap said bacon and eggs for a whole new meat and egg delivery vehicle. Throw some salsa on that and you have a quality mexican breakfast.

Seriously, a rule in weightlifting is that you can't execute a lift properly by starting from a poor position. Breakfast is like starting your day in the right position. Eggs, bacon, and some other type of meat are the correct position. Not eating breakfast is like throwing in the towel for the whole day. Unless you are not eating breakfast because of the possibility of brunch. If so good form. Don't take from me though. Take it from my hero slash, slightly slimmer father, Ron Swanson.

Bites You in the Ass

Admittedly, I was thinking of returning to the midwest at the end of May. Driving home was going to be another fun little road trip. Unfortunately, I little pain in my arse is cutting my trip a little shorter than I expected. HAHA I really am crawling back to mommy and daddy. I was a little distrought having a weird pain on my tailbone, and not being able to sit and sleep is not a fun deal. Being 2000 miles away from anyone I would feel comfortable looking at my butt is also not a good feeling.

I will look on the positive side of this whole ordeal. I did something by the seat of my pants, and why you fly by the seat of your pants for tool long your ass is sure to take a hit. How exactly I got a cyst in my fannie I will never be able to know. I know that I was doing a lot of lifting and work. Further, my living arrangements probably were not the most convienient for someone of my activity level. You live and learn. STILL THE ORDEAL IS A BIT EMBAR-ASSING, but I will laugh about it later.

I have learned a lot in the past two months. A great deal of it about myself. Still, I needed a great deal of help from my family, thanks mom, the people at Catalyst Athletics have been really cool. I still don't know exactly where I want to go from here. That's not a big deal. I'll figure it out. The most important thing seems to be the fact that you just gotta experiment with stuff, see what works, what doesn't, and then go from there.

I am a confused, yet eager young man. I see this as a good thing. You have to be actively thinking and working on yourself to be confused. Further, the fact that I am eager shows that I care about the person I am going to become.  Hopefully I have made some connections that will benefit me in the future.

Talent Is Overrated

I just finished reading Geoff Colvin's Talent is Overrated. The book seeks to debunk the idea of innate ability, and god given talent. Instead, Colvin puts the emphasis on great amounts of practice. Specifically, what is known as deliberate practice. The book seeks to show that success and great achievement is more a product of extremely hard work and less about what we so often call talent.

The book touches on the idea of 10 years or 10,000 hours of practice to mastery of a skill. Colvin uses analogies to sports, business, the arts, and just about any field where we percieve someone's achievement as a gift. If nothing else the book gives hope to all who believe that they are cannot get better. Colvin lays out the idea of deliberate practice in order to help others get better in any particular field.

Deliberate practice is probably not a foreign idea. The idea of practice is the first thing that comes to our heads when we want to get better at something. That being said a lot of us, myself included, phone in our practice and just go through the motions. While we may make some gains the end product will not be great achievement. Think about how many people go play golf. Every round is practice, but if you are not actively focusing on how you are hitting each shot, and why the way you hit this shot will effect you in the future then your practice is not really deliberate.

Deliberate practice is Tiger Wood's burying a ball in the sand and hitting that shot over and over again, maybe a thousand times. Knowing that he may only see that shot in actual competition two times a year, but if he can get that shot right he can make other shots in similar situations. Deliberate practice is hard, focused, and exhausting. Good violinists, chess players, and business moguls practice their craft actively for hours on end- sacrificing a lot of things in order to achieve their goals.

Colvin shows that starting early is a definite benefit. Examples of Mozart, Woods, and other child phenoms show that success at an early age, with continued practice and drive, allows great performance at an early age. Still, others, particularly in business fields, may have started later, but they were still able to achieve a great deal.

Colvin has two main points. One is that success and great achievement is a matter of many factors. Hard work, a strong continued drive to succeed, and the nurturing circumstances needed to support the first two. Second, is the fact that we can all get better if we incorporate the ideas of great success into our everyday lives. The main point being that if we practice deliberately, and focus on improvement we can get better at our jobs, sports, and art.

Institutionalized

A couple of the "crew members" at TRADER JOE'S were discussing how long they had been working there yesterday. They both claimed to be "institutionalized" after their 8-10 years of working there. It made me think about the fact that I had been working there a month, and I was already looking forward to getting out.

I don't know how people do what they do. If nothing else this little bout of fringe living has left me completely humbled by other people. I must be a pretty big bitch to want to actually enjoy my job. You can learn a lot by just paying attention to the people or situations that you would have otherwise overlooked. More often than not there is somebody making a lot less than you, that didn't go to college, but they probably have the same skill set, if not more skills than you. The only thing that may seperate you two is the support you recieved from others, a single choice you made when you were 18-19, or some amount of luck.

To be honest I think luck is not that random. Good things usually come to those who have prepared well. Still, the notion of being "institutionalized" by Trader Joe's is probably more accurate than we realize. Life is a series of cycles. I think life is chaotic enough as it is that we try to control our situations as much as possible. While these guys are smart enough and hard working enough to find other work they have grown comfortable with their situation and see changing it as a risky task.

This is something that happens quite a bit in many parts of our lives. Government is one area that comes to my mind. Elected officials often "go along to get along", and nothing really gets done. Change is hard, really hard. Especially when the direction is unclear. I know that I am a lot more comfortable when I know I have a deadline, or a finishing point. Things are easy when you can see the finish line, but constantly working towards an end you aren't really sure of is a difficult endeavor.

Really there is no way of knowing how life will end up. You can only give it your best shot. Hopefully, without getting to institutionalized along the way.

Take Your Own Advice

I should probably go in to the incredible field of "life coaching". I have trouble taking my own advice, but I am happy to hand it out. Yesterday, I set a timeline, or probably better phrased as a plan, for the next few weeks. This spawned out of my need to do something different, and get the hell out of Muscavegas, Iowa, the best part of it has been the lifting and me just making things happen as the come. Learning to slow down is difficult.

I guess it spawns from my inability to run fast. For that reason I tried to beat everybody else in other things. Overcompensating for my inability to beat them in foot race. While moving out here permanently may not be in the picture for a bit, and maybe never- who the hell knows, I have still learned a lot about myself and a sport I really love doing. Eventually, I would like to teach that sport to others. Even as I type this I have sent an email to my former advisor asking "how long will it take me to get a teacher accreditation. I'll never learn.

I am a weird dude. A-social at times, but I love being the center of attention. Impatient as hell, but I'll wait for things if I really need to. Smart, yet constantly confused. I have made some cool connections out here, but I find myself thinking about some of the connections I have blown in the past, by fading away and not keeping in touch. Maybe that is life, maybe it's me. Overall I think that if I have learned anything at all on this trip it's to trust myself. Things usually have a way of working out.

It's Friday, another week down. I got a bunch more Friday's in my future, but Stephen Colbert makes this one a bit better.