What Do You Think?
What Do You Think?
Asking for help is wonderful to learn a new skill. And the best help is the help that helps you to come to your own conclusion.
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What do Shakespeare, Hermann Hesse, and Peter Thiel have in common?
The amazing thing about podcasts is that you learn about things you never knew existed. This conversation, like last week’s W.L.T., diverges from what I usually post here. But I absolutely loved this conversation, and I’m convinced you will too.
After listening, I signed up for Ellen’s Muse By Mail service.
What Do You Think?
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” I remember being asked this question every year through elementary and middle school. I’m betting you were asked the same question. I’m also willing to bet you had no idea about the infinite possibilities that exist in the world. How could you? For most of us, smartphones didn’t exist as kids. Now, we have a world run by apps.
It is impossible to know what you don’t know—that too is infinite. Even at 33 years old, I am still figuring out what exactly I want to do in the world. But I frequently come back to two words: Something different.
There is a significant difference between the skills we acquire and the attributes that shape who we are. Our attributes—how coachable we are, how curious we are, how we carry ourselves, our temperment—influence our ability to learn skills, but they are abstract and immeasurable. Perhaps we’d be better off asking kids something more abstract, like, “What do you see yourself doing in the world?” From a very early age, I knew my answer would have been “Helping people.” How that would manifest itself, I would have never known 25 years ago. What about you? Did you have a more accurate answer? What do you think?
Skill Acquisition
“Slow down, focus on your breathing. Do you feel the difference?” Sound familiar? For many of you, this is a phrase you hear me say often during your training sessions. One of the most important things that happens to your body when you exercise—specifically, strength training—is the development of neuromuscular control, a fancy way of saying your brain’s ability to contract and relax a particular muscle.
This is a topic I covered back in February in my article, Automated Processes, which I recommend reading if you haven’t already. My objective is to take that concept and tie in another similar idea.
What happens when we begin to learn a new skill? We’re terrible! We absolutely suck. Understandably so. Would we expect someone to come in on day one and be as good at our job as we are? Yet many people expect perfection of themselves when they come to the gym for the first time. Conversely, if someone knows they won’t do well the first time, they may not show up at all because they fear failing.
“There’s really one way to get confidence, and that’s to earn it. Any kind of confidence that’s not earned is probably better defined as ego. One of the things you get from having done it is the sense that you can do it.” — Ryan Holiday
This is not unique to exercise. After graduating college, I became interested in learning about philosophy. I purchased every book I could find and afford on Amazon, from Cicero to Plato to Aristotle to Machiavelli; the list goes on. However, there was one small problem: I was a frightfully slow reader. As a result, I suffered the consequences of both aforementioned plights.
Throughout high school and college, I never enjoyed reading—Spark Notes and I spent a lot of time together. Yet somehow, I convinced myself that not only reading, but understanding history’s greatest thinkers would be easy. I expected perfection. I soon found that my reading and comprehension skills came nowhere near matching my expectations of where they should be. Fear set in that I wasn’t smart enough to understand them and did what most people do a month after starting their exercise journey: I gave up.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
Willpower was the focal point of Andrew Huberman’s discussion with David Goggins, the subject of my article, The Most Important Conversation We’ll Ever Have. Huberman mentions a part of the brain called the Anterior Midcingulate Cortex (aMCC), which, like a muscle, grows with resistance training. However, this resistance training does not come from lifting weights; it comes from doing things we don’t want to do. Our willpower can grow and shrink, just like our biceps.
Many people, myself included, want to learn a new skill. What we don’t want is to feel like failures. The amount of time people apologize to me for not achieving perfection on an exercise is astounding. It’s perfectly understandable; I was guilty of it with my personal trainer. We don’t like being bad at things—especially in front of others.
But failure is the prerequisite to success. The enemy is not to try in the first place. To say to yourself, “I’ll do it tomorrow.”
Climbing Over Walls
Every exercise has a “sticking point”—the point at which the exercise is immensely difficult. If you get low enough in a squat, you’ll immediately feel that sticking point when you push back up. If you get low enough in a bench press, you’ll feel it several inches above your chest. If you don’t get enough range of motion, you won’t reach that sticking point, thus missing a crucial part of the exercise. But getting low enough is uncomfortable.
Similarly, learning a new skill has many sticking points. To get past these sticking points, we have to get uncomfortable. Coming back to Andrew Huberman, he used the cold plunge to describe how he views each sticking point as a wall to climb over:
“I think of everything in life as it relates to the stress system as coming at you like a wall… The way I approach cold is, I look at the cold plunge and I think, ‘How resistant am I psychologically to getting in it?’ And usually it’s ‘very’. I’m not excited to get in. I’m excited about the feeling I know will exist when I get out. So I think of getting in as the first wall. It’s like climbing over a wall.
…Ultimately, we are all highly individual in terms of how we react to stressors in a given moment. And what I find is that there’s tremendous learning in noticing stress coming towards us; us confronting that stress, getting past that stress; and then moving through it and then when I get out, I always feel much better.
…The ability to notice how stress hits you… and to stay calm and ride through that in a safe way is a skill that is invaluable.”
Application of Sticking Points
My wife and I recently discussed our personal growth goals over the years. I mentioned to her that this year, there have been two meaningful skills I’ve worked to improve:
1. Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT): I first heard of DBT in 2022 while listening to Josh Wolfe and Derek Thompson. This year, I have invested time in developing this skill. DBT is centered around a technique called Wise Mind. It splits the mind into the “Emotional Mind” and the “Reasonable Mind”.
The emotional mind is often your first reaction to a situation—Walking into a room and seeing that your toddler peed on the floor, for example, yields a very powerful emotional response…
On the flip side, the reasonable mind responds slower but allows you to step back and process the situation—if another human is involved, often from their perspective. In my toddler example, the reasonable mind may be able to conclude that the toddler had filled their diaper and could not express this in time for the parent to change it.
Employing this tactic was incredibly difficult at first. But, like all things practiced, it got easier. And it works just as well for exercising as it does for kids. When I can resist the initial emotional tidal wave of wanting to be lazy, I will often think more reasonably and get off my ass.
2. The more transformative change has been to ask myself: “If this person agreed with my worldview, would I value what they have to say?” I have learned much more from expanding the foundation of information I consume. The most recent example was Peter Thiel, whom I mentioned last week. My former self had no interest in hearing anything he had to say because of his beliefs. Here’s the problem: he’s a brilliant thinker. His idea that “competition is for losers” is something I believe every aspiring business owner, leader, or creative person should internalize in their own work.
Does listening to Peter sway my worldview? Not in the slightest. I disagree with almost everything he believes in. But am I better off because I listened to his ideas? One hundred percent.
The Key Issue
This brings us to my final point. In my first Envision Endeavor article, I highlighted Arthur Brooks’ discussion with Dr. Peter Attia. According to Arthur’s research, one of the macronutrients—the fundamental elements—of happiness is purpose. We each have a purpose for living and living well. But finding that purpose is not easy. In fact, according to many philosophers dating to Plato’s Republic, most humans live in unreflective states of being, living day-to-day without taking time to reflect on themselves and the world around them.
How do we do something about that? There is a lot of wisdom in simplicity:
“Humans are… biological beings who are perfectly free to think and act in all sorts of ways—including ways that undermine their own well-being. They’re perfectly free to fail. They’re perfectly free to ruin their lives and make themselves unhappy. What they aren’t perfectly free to do is live well. To live well they need to exercise their autonomy in specific ways. Not just any choices will do… It’s not enough simply to believe you’re doing what it takes to live well because your beliefs about well-being can be false. We see the results all around us: the world is full of unhappy people. None of them wants to be unhappy. They’ve nevertheless made themselves unhappy through choices they’ve freely made.” — Ask Aristotle
I prefaced this article by saying that, as a kid, had the question been, “What do you see yourself doing in the world?” my answer would have been to help people. How that would manifest itself, I would have never known at the time. It took many stepping stones along the journey to get here, and among the stepping stones were many dead ends.
As you conclude reading this article, how would you reflect on your mission? How often do you reflect on whether your day-to-day life aligns with your mission? Do you believe how well-aligned your actions are with your mission influences the decisions you make regarding your health? What do you think?
Other Learning
Podcasts:
Articles:
Quiet Compounding — Morgan Housel
How Monster Beverage is Fueling a Renaissance — Kyla Scanlon
Letter to a Friend Who is Thinking of Starting Something New — Sari Azout
The Great American Poisoning — Justin Mares
Experts vs. Imitators — Shane Parrish
Why the U.S. CHIPs Act Matters to the World — Kyle Chan
The Triumph of Electromagnetism Over Thermodynamics — Noah Smith
Marketing Lessons from Religious Institutions — Adam Singer
Perplexity Is a Bullshit Machine — WIRED
Nutrition & Health News This Week — Unsettled Science by Nina Tiechholz and Gary Taubes