Lessons From 2022: Being Right About Everything is Impossible...

Well, since I have been down with the usual Bakersfield malaise of no sunlight for days, I decided to look inward for an end of the year review of what lessons I have learned this year. Pretty simple really, just asked myself “am I more evolved than last year?”

2022 was a distinctively transformative year of my life, so I wanted to express some of these lessons and share them with all of you in a few blog posts scattered throughout the last days of 2021… Maybe something will resonate with you for a year-end epiphany to help guide you to undertake a similar exercise.

Let’s make these short and sweet. A life lesson bogged down in a long explanation sometimes gets lost in translation…

Realization: I have learned to enjoy being wrong…

Always value finding the truth over being right. This is for every aspect of your life. Politics, religion, personal philosophy, etc. Imagine yourself as a scientist just doing experiment after experiment and learning something new each time you perform the experiment. Think about how it isn’t possible for you to know everything, and everyone has a different way of thinking about things and we all could teach one another something.

For some odd reason, the only information we want to obtain and believe already fits our personal world view. We reject any and all ideas that threaten that world view instead of considering the very real possibility that we might be wrong. When all of our beliefs are built like a game of Kevin Bacon and the Six Degrees of Separation, then all new information leads to validating your original belief. When you think about that for just a second you can see the utter absurdity of your egocentrism.

So admit it, you’re quite fallible and you cannot possibly be right about everything floating around in your head. In fact, take a second to consider how Zen it would be to say “I don’t know…” when asked a question. How about listening to a volatile viewpoint instead of formulating an argument before the other person is done talking and now the pressure to defend is gone and your mind is open for a new way of thinking.

Retrain your mind to embrace new information that forces a change in viewpoint. Think of it as a software update. Still might be a little buggy, might even not work at all but you can always adjust or just roll back the update to the old ideas. No harm, no foul and think about this…

By listening without prejudice, you’re learning… 

Oh Fuck, Not Another Motivational Sermon...

In my last four “ 100 Day Life Change Challenges” I made it a goal to listen to some sort of motivational speech  every day. So for the past year I have listened to one form or another of a Ted Talk, motivational speech, coaching, etc for 20 minutes every morning. At day 51 of this fourth challenge, that adds up to 351 days of the good, the bad and the downright terrible presentations and  I am finding them to be almost like religion in that every life coach and motivational speaker is saying the exact same thing but with their little twist on it...Every guru has their book, their method and their path to their particular form of motivational enlightenment. In other words, Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha and Krishna are all pretty much saying the same damn thing we just have our preferences about how we want to accept the message of do unto others, love your neighbor and stop being a dick…

The motivational world has their David Goggins to scream obscenities at you and shame you into taking better care of yourself, Tony Robbins to kindly and sanely show you that you can make your life better and Mr. Les Brown to remind you that no matter what your circumstances are, there is a way out. They are all saying the same damn thing with the same message packaged differently. The same buzz words pop up in every message they convey. Discipline, motivation, goals, new, challenge, truth, determination, perseverance, freedom, tenacity, learning, endurance, courage, hope, time management and my personal favorite, ACTION!  Some will tell you to “start slow” because change can only come about incrementally, while others will tell you that change is like a high speed car accident and you need to come out of the gates like a bull with a cowboy on your back…One will say follow the guidelines in their bestselling book and you will get the results the same as they did and then the next speaker will say, find your own way because change is a personal journey but they still have that bestseller just in case you need some guidelines to making your choice as to how you will choose your own path… Same message, different approach… Now let me tell, I have read the books, listened to the messages and followed the path that many of these people have laid down for us. If you read my first 100 Day Life Change Challenge Blog you know I read hundreds of self help books with smug authors on the cover, arms crossed looking at me like, you dumb motherfucker, you should have figured this out for yourself... In fact, so many that my wife questioned whether I was on my journey or theirs and I had to admit that I lost myself in that storm of inspiration… Like a young philosophy student, I was jumping from ideology to ideology in search of the “hack”, the easy way to change my life, the one that would suddenly open my eyes to the way to enlightenment and make me a better, happier, healthier and more understanding person…

Sound familiar? Jumping from one spiritual journey to the next, changing gurus, changing diet plans, exercise plans, changing every time you get bored, buried or burnt out? Can’t find the thing that gives you that wide on you desire…

By the way, there is no life hack for this…

Hopefully, this will help but I don’t have a bestseller for you to buy nor will I release an exercise series for you to try or try to sell you on becoming a vegan, trying intermittent fasting or meditating…What I will tell you is pretty counterintuitive at first glance but hang with me for a second…

In simple terms, you can’t change your mind about the things we are talking about. You can’t wake up a vegan, go to bed out of shape and wake up with an exercise mindset. You cannot “decide” to become a learner instead of a TV watcher…Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not saying you can’t make the decision to try but if you look at the history of your decisions, if you are honest, they pretty much look like a string of failures for as far back as you can see. How many times have you decided to lose that weight, read that book, eat better, or go to bed earlier? How much of that are you doing today? In fact, how much more weight have you put on, fallen further out of shape and do things like hide the book you wanted to read as not to distract you from watching Big Brother? So instead of these “decisions” altering you for the better, they might be shoving you further down the hole you’re in… Multiple failures at not getting the results you desire makes you feel like a failure and failures have a failure mindset making it doubly difficult to climb out of the hole they dug for themselves…

So now what? Sounds hopeless doesn’t it? Listen, you’re making decisions about the wrong fucking end of the plan… I’m going to quit smoking is the end game… I’m going to lose 10 pounds is the end game… I’m going to get a masters degree, meditate 20 minutes day, read every day, learn to play the guitar, and on and on and on… All these things are definitive in that they all are great goals; they are just things that take massive shifts in one thing… Shifts in behavior…

Didja catch that? You have to change your fucking behaviors in order to meet any of those challenges. If I say right now that I am deciding that I am going to paint a perfect copy of The Mona Lisa I have to shift my behaviors in order to meet the criteria it takes to make that happen. I need supplies and I need to use those supplies to start practicing to recreate The Mona Lisa. I’m not going to wake up next Thursday and discover that I “somehow” did it when I wasn’t paying attention.

In order to make changes, it isn’t about decisions about what you want out of yourself. Making goals is great, but without changes in behaviors, those goals aren’t worth a puddle of piss… If you say you want to quit smoking and you continue your ritualistic behaviors attached to your habit of smoking, it’s called a pipe dream. (No pun intended but on the proof reading I saw the humor…) For instance, if you say to yourself, “it’s time to quit smoking” and you walk out to the spot you smoke at every day at the same time you do every day with the same robotic behaviors, you aren’t going to quit anything, you’re just going to bury that “decision to quit” like you bury everything else that makes you uncomfortable about yourself. If you decide that the time has come to lower your blood pressure and lose the weight before the threat from the doctor to put you on medication becomes real and lunch comes and you drive to the same restaurants and eat the same food, the decision you made yesterday wasn’t a decision, it was a wish… Just like every other time you have said “I wish I could lose this weight”… 

This isn’t easy and the struggle never stops… I fight lethargy, laziness, and my own obstinate attitude every day of my life. I make excuses that I have to overcome, I want to eat things I shouldn’t and if you think getting up when it is still dark outside to exercise for 2 hours and meditate before I come to work is something I want to do, you’re more of an idiot than I am.

Let me stop right there and go off on a tangent…. Aw, you missed me didn’t you? Hahaha…

For all of you people out there who are runners and you talk about that “runner’s high” you get when you push past the point of exhaustion… I would like to say right now I hate your fucking guts…  For all the people out there who love the gym and can’t wait to get on the treadmill, I hate you… Everyone has a different journey and I think I am more jealous of you than I hate you. I don’t get high from burpees, running or cardio… I don’t step up to the 0445 yoga mat with a boner… Like my digital mentor Joe Rogan says, “If I only worked out when I felt like it, I would be a fat motherfucker…” So seriously, my journey to this level of fitness hasn’t been easy, and I suspect that it will never be easy. I have far more respect for the fit person that doesn’t necessarily like exercise than I do for the person who gets a runner’s high… I do not like burpees in the darkness of the early morning, I like sleeping much better… If I had my choice with no consequences, I would choose pizza and vodka with cranberry followed by a fat bong rip rather than healthy food and meditation…

Maybe that wasn’t as tangential as I thought… These behavior changes that I made are based on what I spoke of before… The decisions I made long ago were to lose weight, be in better health, have a better attitude, be calmer, stop drinking, stay off drugs, avoid the problems of growing older in poor health… But those decisions were useless without me changing my behaviors. That’s why in the mental health field we talk quite a bit about behavior modification. That’s why we have sober living communities to remove people from their toxic environment to a place where people are trying to develop better habits. That’s why we have exercise groups with people who don’t go to the pizza place after a five mile run… We have to MODIFY OUR BEHAVIORS in order to meet goals…

Now after hundreds of hours of motivational speakers, hundreds of books, years of trial and error with diet and exercise and hundreds of hours of meditation, I still do not call myself an expert… I do however live a life that lots and lots of people ask questions about and I have modified my answers time and time again trying my best to convey my knowledge of how I attained this level of positive behavior modification.  Only now am I starting to see that all these people that we listen to help us live better, the psychologists, social workers, Recovery Specialists, motivational speakers, authors, and life coaches are really just repeating one message in a myriad of different formats and codified language… That message is a simple, and quiet and quite powerful: Change Your Behaviors and Change Your Life.

Want to learn the guitar? Get a guitar and practice instead of some behavior that wastes your time… Want to lose weight? Change the behaviors making you gain weight… For every action, there is an outcome… Change the action, change the outcome…

Get to work…

 

 

When You Get Knocked Down, Consider the Lesson Before You Get up...

So there I was, top of my game and I had been there for a while… I was noticing some odd things about being really fit and exceptionally healthy after 8 months of pretty much straight killing it. I was taking it for granted that I was in better shape than when I was in my twenties. Like everything else, once you have it for a while, it starts to feel mundane, normal to feel not just good, but great…

With these feelings, came workouts that were mediocre. I felt like I could skip things in my 100 Day Challenge and not sweat it because I felt like I was doing enough. Didn’t read on Tuesday? No problem, I had been reading daily for months… Didn’t practice guitar on Thursday? That’s fine; I had done it enough to make up for my lack of enthusiasm. My workouts I never missed but I noticed that my heart wasn’t in it anymore. I switched it up, changed exercises and changed my routine but I just couldn’t find that spark I needed to feel like I was conquering the workout rather than just going through the motions.

A lot of people ask me how I achieve the consistency that I maintain and not quit… I tell them that I am just like everyone else, I want to quit. It’s hard to get up every single day at the same time regardless of weekends or holidays. It’s hard to eat well every single day, day in and day out. Keeping a schedule is sometimes grueling, especially when you just don’t fucking feel like doing it. I am human, and I have the exact same inclinations that every human being walking the planet has. So look, it’s not that I never doubt myself or have that inclination to procrastinate or the desire to avoid a workout or a self imposed challenge. I don’t always feel like doing what I should do…

So what’s the difference between me and the majority of the population?

I simply focus and lean into it. I act anyway, regardless of how I feel. It would be fucking great if I could decide to never have a negative thought, but that isn’t realistic is it? Even the most positive of us get gripped by the throat by a negative hand once in a while, no matter how hard we try to avoid it.

So 25 days into my newest 100 Day Challenge, a wonderful thing happened to me… I got a lung infection and it took me completely out of the game. Let me say that again for those of you who didn’t catch that… The best thing that could have happened to me happened… I got taken out by a lung infection. Missed almost a week of work, missed almost a week of workouts. I stopped getting up early, slept in and simply laid on my back and watched television.

The first few days, I was not thankful, like a petulant child I whined about how this infection fucked up my 100 Day Challenge and I would have to start P90X over, I would have to restart my 100 Day Challenge cycle, etc... I would lose muscle mass, gain weight, my back started hurting and other self-indulgent bleating until I was sick of myself. Poor Bob, he couldn’t work out… What was he to do?

Well, first of all, I stopped feeling sorry for myself because I had been lying to myself for quite a while anyway. I was so tired, and bored of working out that I cheated on almost every session. I was just going through the motions and I knew it. Now listen, I was working out and that was more than most people but I try never to compare myself to the average person.

Let’s stop right for a second so I can clarify that statement. Some might leap on me right here and ask me that accusatory question of “So you think you are better than the average person?” That’s not what I meant at all. When I say I do not compare myself to the average person, I don’t mean that I think I am better. I compare myself to the Dwayne Johnsons of the world. I don’t mean I am better than anyone, when I do my comparisons, I mean I am not as disciplined as the people I compare myself to. I look to the people that push themselves so hard that they are obviously superior to me. I strive to be like them. They get up 0430 to work out; I get up at 0430 to work out. They read a book a week; I read a book a week. Instead of thinking that I am better than anyone else, I choose to look at the people in the world who are working harder than me. I want to work as hard as top athletes like Kobe Bryant who instead of stopping after breaking a finger, he just changed the way he shot the ball, intellects like Noam Chomsky and game changers like Elon Musk. I don’t want to be better than anyone; I simply want to be as good at what I do as the people I look up to. This isn’t about ego, this is about how far an average person can push themselves to be the best person they can be.

 I hold myself to a high standard when it comes to diet, exercise, positivity and self improvement. I knew that the last few weeks were going to end badly for me. A workout where I would just cruise through it, an extra helping of food, a 20 minute snooze session… I was rushing through exercise time and cruising through my self improvement time taking it easy and lying to myself that missing a day of reading here or a guitar practice there was okay, because ”I was doing so well…” When we are working for self improvement we can clearly see results (or the “not” results) folks, and we know when we are not doing the fucking work or just coasting. First rule for self improvement should be “tell the fucking truth about what you are doing or not doing” because not following the program you laid out for yourself won’t get you where you want to be…

Let’s get back to that lung infection, shall we? In the middle of the week I switched from “poor me I had a setback” to “shut the fuck up and find your way out of this.”  There had to be some great lessons in this impedance to my progress.

The first thing I realized was that in the last few weeks, I hadn’t made any progress. Going through the motions is not progress. It isn’t going backwards but it sure wasn’t as satisfying as it could have been either. So this little break I was forced to take wasn’t interrupting anything great, in fact, it alerted me to the fact that I was slacking off.

Okay… Now that I had that settled, I started watching some YouTube videos, documentaries and videos that were educational, informative and enlightening. Feeding my mind philosophy, provocative thought and meaningful dialogue instead of filling it with useless, entertainment designed to pass my time painlessly.

Instead of whining about my predicament, I changed gears and made my predicament a constructive situation… Now what exactly could be positive about getting a lung infection that knocks you off the top of the mountain? Good question, I’m really glad you asked… Let’s find out, shall we?

Lesson One: The Value of a Healthy Body

We could also call this lesson “you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.” When you’re healthy, it’s the status quo. You can do anything and everything, and it becomes normal. So what is there to appreciate about normal? Nothing, it’s normal… That is correct until you get a lung infection and you don’t have that health anymore, life becomes substantially more difficult. Simple shit like showering goes from a 15 minute job to a medium-term project… Grocery shopping? Yikes… Getting a cup of coffee from the kitchen goes from a no-brainer to making a bed escape plan that only Steve McQeen could pull off… So being sick gave me that perspective again of what unhealthy feels like and how difficult life is when you aren’t in top physical shape.

Lesson Two: Learning to Accept a “New Normal” Even if Only Temporarily

Getting sick was obviously not what I wanted or intended to do so it might sound counterintuitive to practice acceptance in the face of illness. Making peace with the reality of my temporary loss of physical fitness time and the inevitable pain of the restart helped me get past the unhappiness… Yes, it sucks to feel like you’re starting from scratch, but I imagine I will survive and before I know it, I will surpass the level of fitness I was before I got sick… My trick is to not obsess over lost strength and flexibility and concentrate on the fact that the return will be easier because I have done this many times before and I know that even though it will suck hairy donkey balls to get up in the morning at 0430 I will probably have that little smile because I will be proud of myself for doing it. I will hit it hard too because if you gotta suck hairy donkey balls, may as well put your heart into it… The donkey will appreciate it.

Lesson Three: Set New Goals

Today, in addition to this blog, I am working on my new action plan… New exercises, new challenges and new goals for a new 100 Day Challenge. The stagnation I hit was going to stall me out even if I had not gotten the infection in my lung. Eventually I would have had to stop and retool anyway, so this sickness was the universe’s way of telling me to take a break. I learned from the boredom I hit during the last series not to let it get the best of me. So I had a setback, which just gives me the opportunity for that huge adrenaline/dopamine rush of a huge comeback… Stronger, faster, smarter and even better than the best I have ever been.

So listen, when you get knocked down, don't just get up... Stay there for a second and consider what it means to get up. Learn your lessons, retool and rework your plan... Staying down for a second doesn't make you weak, but getting up and doing the same thing over makes you a dipshit... Learn the lessons, set new goals and get up like Buster Douglas did against Mike Tyson... Shock yourself, you got it in you..

So tomorrow morning I start again…  Now it’s time for me “ Get to Fucking Work…”

Peace

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Truth Is You Never Know Unless You Give It a Shot....

The coolest thing in the world for me is to learn… To acquire a skill is the epitome of being human. Most animals walking, crawling or slithering around have a very limited capacity for growth… A bear learns how to be a bear and occasionally will learn a new skill to help it continue to exist but I am fairly certain bears don’t have epiphanic moments or existential crisis due to lack of knowledge… At best, the bear will try to open the trashcan, get pissed off that it can’t open the trashcan, continue to try to open it and if it happens to succeed, it eats, if not, it walks away… Now humans on the other hand will get interested in something that has nothing to do with their survival, get curious, do some research, try it out, get better at it and acquire a skill that does nothing more than make them happy… how fucking cool is that? You never see a bear playing a banjo, unless you go to Chuck E. Cheese and even then, even the smallest child has suspicions about the repetitious movements and not too quiet mechanical sounds…

Now on the other hand, a human can fall in love with the idea of wanting to do something and then use that love against themselves to actually cause anxiety… I want to play the guitar repeated endlessly for years can become depressing if never actually acted on…

My second turn at a 90 Day Life Change Challenges ended last night in the shower… 

Before I go on, I have to say, showers are my prayer closet for ideas, revelations, deep thoughts and epiphanic life changing moments... Some guys masturbate in the shower and I have ground breaking, life changing ideas… Look at me being exceptional and while you might think a little self absorbed but really I’m not, I find standing up to masturbate weird and uncomfortable… Kinda how you are feeling right now with me discussing it… Anyway, I think because I choose a less primitive exploit in the shower, ideas and other ethereal notions abound in the rain room… Most of my ideas for writing, life challenges and other creative endeavors occur to me in the shower…

Okay, now we can go on…

My second round of 90 Day Life Change Challenges ended last night in the shower for a few reasons… This round had a time set aside to learn to speak Spanish as a second language… I even spent $29.95 to purchase 3 months of an app to speed me along towards my lifelong supposition that I wanted to speak Spanish… However, even desires held for decades may have hidden limitations… First, I realized that I do not want to learn to speak Spanish… I have nothing against Spanish, in fact, my thought was I love the IDEA of speaking Spanish. To be multi-lingual sounds exotic and intellectual. I know that in some cases, speaking multiple languages expands understanding of human communication because the intricacies of a language espouse deeper understanding of meaning and definition. In and of itself, that would be my reason for some level of desire to learn a second language and when I was younger, I thought it would help me lure the ladies into my lair… See how I did that? Got deeply philosophical and then BAM, plummet you into the depths of my depravity… Reading my blog can be like riding a rollercoaster… Existential philosophy dropping  into sex in the same sentence… I should be a writer…

I hope you caught what I was trying to expound there before the joke… I had this very lucid epiphany, my clear thought was “You are not in love with this; you are in love with the idea of this.” This isn’t what will drive you to learn… 

Second reason I terminated the second 90 Day Life Challenge early… Too many activities in one day doesn’t allow me to get good at any one thing… It gave me the opportunity to try a lot of stuff but not enough time with each one to master any of them… 

Yesterday I spent a few hours doing an art project for a co-worker… She wanted a series of sketches for her house and she asked me to make them for her… If I had allotted my usual Challenge time for them, I would have given myself a half hour and it would have taken me weeks to finish them… So yesterday, I blew off my guitar, Spanish and reading time to make a huge mess and finish them in a one shot endeavor that took hours but was productive and satisfying… The fucked up my 90 Day Life Change Challenge schedule completely and in the shower I realized that doing the things I love take far longer than ½ hour a day and I may not want to do them every day anyway… I imagine Michelangelo took a day here and there to do something besides paint or sculpt… 

Finally, my biggest epiphany was that the first 90 Day Life Change Challenge did EXACTLY what I wanted it to do… It dramatically changed my life… It taught me to try new things, bring back old habits that I loved and eliminate the nonsense bullshit ideas of things that I don’t like… I learned that I loved to write, I loved to exercise, I brought back daily meditation, daily reading… I found out that experimentation is key to happiness… Yes, the first challenge was about taking specific times to do specific things and teaching me to stop watching television, stop wasting my life stop doing things that don’t need done and start doing things I want to do… It taught me to try those things I always wanted to try and then when they don’t fit, stop fucking thinking about them…

Isn’t that beautiful? Seriously, I found myself… From now on I won’t think, “I have always wanted to…” Instead, I will set aside time and fucking do it… If I like it, I will add it to the things I do, either often or occasionally and if I don’t, I will not torture myself with thoughts about trying it… My guitar is no longer something I dust, it has become a part of my day, a part of life… I write every day now, be it a book I am working on or a blog… I stopped thinking “I really should write, I like to do it…”

My list of things I have always wanted to do, or things I should try is now far shorter and in reality, I sometimes get cognitive dissonance because that list sometimes disappears and I am left with the thought that I need to expand my horizons and think beyond my limited desires… My favorite thing is still to learn but it has now become a puzzle to figure out what I want to learn… Learning about discovery… I think this is one of the most beautiful things I have ever realized… 

The 90 Day Life Change Challenge did something for me that I never expected, it set me free… By putting myself into a situation that I had no choice for 3 months, it gave me unbounded freedom to see myself as having the ability to do whatever I want to do and the autonomy to cease activities that don’t interest me… Slowly over the course of three months, I carved deep cerebral pathways around the self limiting habits that had a chokehold on me. 

You can have this too… It’s like I always say…

Fucking get to work… Now is always the best time to start…

Day 90...

 “You are sovereign over your own life. You are your own guru. You are your own soulmate. You are the architect of your reality, and you have the power to create it as you choose.”

― Amy Leigh Mercree

In 90 days, I changed everything... If I can do this, anyone can do this... Now, get to work...

Day 89: A Short Blog, a Birthday and a Goal Unexpectedly Shattered...

Short blog before the final day... April 9 just happens to mark my emergence from the vagina and I have been busy chilling out since exercise time this morning... Well, actually, I did my 1/2 Murph, plank and Pull-up Challenge this morning, went on an adventure and then did P90X3 Pilates, yoga and meditation this afternoon... I fed myself Better Bowls for lunch and got an extra one for dinner so today has been a pretty damned good day...

Just to give you an idea of how old I am, I have been alive for 20,454 days... I have traveled in space 5,205,525,192 miles circling the sun... That a long time and quite a few miles... Not tired yet...

Now... My goal shattering adventure... When I started this journey back in January, I weighed 168 pounds and a little over 18% body fat... My goal was 13.5% and whatever weight I happened to land on... I had to go to REV Nutrition today but I didn't want to step on the BodyScan analyzer because I was pretty sure I didn't make my goal... For the last two scans, I was stuck in the 14% range and I was resigned to the fact that I wasn't going to make it... 

So the guy behind the counter sold me my BCAA's and then asked me if I was going to weigh in... I said no because it was my birthday and I didn't want that bad news today, I would be back tomorrow morning... He bet me that I had made my goal and said if I was under 14% he would give me two         t-shirts... 

Who is going to pass up the chance for two free t-shirts?

Shoes off, keys, phone and wallet out... I stepped on the scale and watched that  scale rise, then slow, then stop on 165.0 pounds... Two pounds heavier than two weeks ago and I steeled myself for my disappointment... The the Body Fat Percentage meter started a meteoric rise, slowed, slower, slower and it stopped... At 13.4%... I stared at that screen for a long time... Then two two t-shirts wrapped around my head and a voice said, "I fucking told you!" and I was blown away... I wanted to rip my shirt off and run around the store but I wasn't wearing a sports bra, so I controlled myself... A little women's soccer joke there if you didn't catch it...

Now that may not sound as exciting to you as it was to me, but I made an impossible goal and then I made it happen... Dropping 4% body fat is hard... Really hard... So a bunch of little goals turned into a big achievement and now I am ready to conquer more... Shit, I felt ten feet tall and bulletproof there for a bit...Then I went out to the truck and I cried because I'm proud of me... That made my birthday pretty fucking cool... The bod fat thing, not the crying... All my hard work has paid of and I am going to rest for a week and plan my next attack... By rest, I mean finish up my last week of this P90X3 cycle, my Plank Challenge and my Pull-up Challenge and eat some tofu because I missed it... Then next week on the 12th I am going to start another 90 Day Life Change Challenge with three more months of extreme exercise, writing, mediation, yoga and some more nonsensical challenges...I am one day from the top of this mountain and I have done everything I said and gained more than I could have possibly imagined... The one thing I doubted, I beat that today... So when I top the mountain in the morning, I'm just going to look around and find a higher mountain... Call me an overachiever, I know...

So Happy Birthday to me... Today, I fucking rule the world... But please don't tell anyone I cried... 

Tomorrow I finish the 90 and that last blog... You're gonna miss me when I'm gone...

Love you like a vegan loves tofu... See you tomorrow...

Day 88: The Trap of Thinking Your Way is the Only Way....

One thing I’ve been noticing in myself over the last few months, and I see other people doing it all the time, is thinking that my way is the right way to do things. We all mean well, but the problem is, thinking your way is the only path to take is highly mistaken… What motivates me may not motivate you… The things that help me will not always help you, and in fact, may send you backwards in your journey… Each person has their own journey, their own needs, and their own goals… We need to communicate our needs and accept that others may have a completely different ride than we do.

We all do it… We all think that where we are in our journey has only one path… That’s like saying you can only climb a mountain one way or there is only one way to get across town…. Maybe we see our path as shorter, faster, or better but think about how you got where you are and consider that your weaknesses and strengths are entirely different from anyone else’s… The funny thing about it is that if we’re not worried that we’re doing things the wrong way, we seem to be sure that our way is the right way. This single minded way of approaching personal development helps no one, including you…

With my 90 Day Life Change Challenge blog I have given advice and tried to motivate people the way I did it… I mean no harm, and although my way is not correct for you, you can always take pieces and fragments to make a part of your journey…

Some ways I’ve thought my way was the best way recently:

•    I judge people who don’t eat as healthy as me. Especially those who eat fast food.
•    I judge people who don’t exercise and think that my way of exercising is the right         way to do it.
•    I have felt superior to people who smoke, drink, and use drugs (even though I used       to do it…).
•    I judge people who watch too much TV (even though I’ve done it…)).

I judge hipsters, Internet trolls, gamers, startup culture, cancel culture, racists, misogynists, gluttons, people who have ads on their sites, people who drive tiny cars, people who are on Facebook or Instagram too much, hoarders, people who aren’t neat or organized, people who don’t have their finances together, people who eat meat, non-vegans…

In other words, I judge everyone, in some way or another, for being different from me, and so, it seems, does everyone else. When someone doesn’t do things your way, you judge them. I see my way is right and although I may not think they are entirely wrong, I think people could do better… Yep, I’m a dick… Now listen though, these are just my thoughts and I try to not act on any of them… I’m working on it because I know I am wrong. People are different, people want different things, and I am trying hard to accept everyone as they are…

This is, of course, just our natural reaction to other people who are different than us. When we stop to think about it, our way can’t possibly be the only right way. Other people just have different preferences, and the world would be boring if everyone were the same, if no one did things differently.

Even though my mind sometimes rebels against me, I want multiplicity. I want different ideas, different music, different art and different philosophies. I want a clash of cultures and ideas. I want to be exposed to a constant stream of diversity. I know that I cannot possible “like” everything that comes my way, but what I want to do is learn to not reject it…

So I urge you to pay attention to when you are thinking your way is better than someone else’s or have a dislike for something too quickly… If you dislike a song, don’t dislike the band until you have danced to the whole album... Notice when you are doing it, question it, and see if you can try to be curious about the other person’s way. How can their way be just as good as yours? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you let people love what they love without rejecting their preferences?

How can we drop judgment and embrace curiosity? I’m trying to do this, and struggling with it, but the fight is worth it.

My way isn’t the only way, but I am doing something that everyone SHOULD do… I am making it a priority to listen to people, consider their advice or choices and accept that their preferences are the right ones for them…

The 90 Day Life Change Challenge update… I didn’t break any records this morning… After today there are TWO DAYS LEFT!!! One good thing about what has happened to me is that I roll out of bed whether or not I want to, exercise whether or not I want to, practice guitar regardless of my mood, write daily even when I would rather not… This last 90 days has taught me that self-improvement isn’t always something I want, but it has become like breathing, a necessary part of my health and well-being… Even when this 90 days ends, I have another in the works and I think that the 90 day construct has become a permanent part of my life…

See you tomorrow… The day before the last day…

Love you guys like a truck driver loves a long haul…