Set a new baseline.
I’ve been feeling a bit melancholic as of late.
It’s nothing in particular, and I couldn’t note anything specifically wrong, but there’s a point when everything starts to feel like groundhog day.
So sure, you can start your day off with a hard task to get you in the zone, but there’s only so many cold showers and black coffees you can substitute an emotional baseline with before you start to see diminishing returns.
What if nothing is great, because everything is, well… good?
So how do you shake it?
I’m no guru, or I would’ve fixed the issue by now, but I’ve found that establishing a new baseline for feeling absolutely horrendous can sometimes be the one thing that sorts your sh*t out.
Like that cold shower in the morning, doing something hard and undeniably unenjoyable — unless you’re a psychopath, or Wim Hof — sets a precedent for the rest of the day.
You’re operating with a new baseline for how much something can suck, and so the juice of everything else seems that little bit sweeter.
But when that’s not enough, maybe it’s time to pull out Des and Troy — more commonly known as the big guns — and find something to really devout yourself to.
Now, don’t get me wrong, it doesn’t have to suck (a lot), but the best rewards come from the hardest work, so chances are it will.
For clarification, I don’t believe it doesn’t have to be physical; I remember the self-inflicted pain of studying for my HSC, and how much that sucked at times, but the overwhelming relief of finishing the final exam was a wave of euphoria.
I think a decent rule of thumb is to be skeptical of an advisor of any kind if they haven’t done the work themselves.
This goes for management and investment consultants, fitness gurus, keynote speakers etc.
If they don’t practice what they preach, then why would you listen to a single word they have to say? *Yes, I’m sure there are exceptions to the rule, don’t @me.
So, given that I’m dishing unsolicited advice on doing something that sucks, I write this after my first session into the 4x4x48.
The details are in my last blog, so I won’t bore you with it again, but just to embrace the suck a little harder, I’ve tacked on a bit more to each run so the 48 hour window rounds to 84kms.
2 days, 2 marathons, 2.5 hour windows for sleep.
There’s very few people on earth that could say they would actively enjoy that, and I fear those people with my whole heart.
I have little doubt that it won’t be feeling delightfully terrible come Sunday afternoon, likely donning a sweet juxtaposition of emotions.
I’ll leave you with this, even though it’s only partially relevant, but you get the point.
”Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.”
Go easy young buck, but don’t deny yourself a hard time every once in a while.
Get to suffering!!!
45 Minutes 05/08/22