Day Six: Taking Responsibility is a Self Inflicted Hell...

I have some readers now and I get questions about why I do this self-inflicted torture so innocently named “self-improvement.” Someday, we will be shitting in our pants. Yep, it is as simple as that folks. We will be sitting around wishing that we’ve done more, been more, attempted more. There seems to be this thread that runs through our lives that says “someday I am going to…” It’s like a dream of the human to sit around and think up shit to torment ourselves with. “I wish I had traveled more…” or “I wish I had gone to school…” My grandfather, perhaps the wisest man I will ever know or maybe my child mind remembers him in a different light than reality but isn’t that why we learn the simple, profound things in life? The child mind decodes those things we are told and accepts them rather than our adult stubbornness that refuses to listen, refuses to be taught… He used to say “shit in one hand and wish in the other and see which gets fullest the fastest…” As a child, I used to laugh but that vulgar wisdom stuck with me all throughout my life. Wish all you want but it won’t amount to fuck all… Ya know? I’m not saying don’t dream of a better existence. Life without hope and dreams would be hellish at best. When we dream, we see ourselves doing better than we are. The trick is dreaming and then turning those dreams into actions. You all know the fucking rhetoric here… Action plans, breaking ideas down into steps that can be done in order to achieve success, etc… My point here is that in order to avoid that last minute panic as you turn 81 and feel that tightening in your chest as your heart nears the end of its rhythmic contractions, you need to stop fantasizing and get to work.  I’m reminded of a quote from The Shawshank Redemption. “Get busy living or get busy dying.” You have 86,400 seconds each day, and it’s your choice what you do with them. It’s your choice to just keep living the life that just gets you by. Or, it’s your choice to finally break out and take those chances that you’ve always dreamed about.

Remember, you can never get more time. Can I shriek that at you so it will sink in? YOU NEVER GET MORE FUCKING TIME!!!!!  Use this time you have right now to take control of your life. It won’t be easy, but nothing good ever comes easy. Life is the one thing that you definitely do not to do over. Don’t let dreams become regrets.

Let’s talk for a few minutes about motivation…

Motivation is bullshit. Oh fuck, I just invalidated everything I have ever said to get people started… So let me adjust it just a little…

Nah… Motivation is bullshit… Now let me clarify that. There are two kinds of motivation. Extrinsic motivation is that motivation you experience when you read blogs, self-help books, listen to motivational speakers, etc… That feeling you have when you read or hear that guy or gal that touches a nerve in your psyche and you make a plan to change some aspect of your life that you are unhappy with. These ideas, although quite valid aren’t really yours. When Les Brown says “Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears”, we feel that truth. The problem is that the thought belongs to Les Brown and even if it is the truth, unless we get Les Brown’s epiphany, it will linger in our minds and fade out doing little or nothing to help us begin our journey towards real change. We would have to have an experience similar to Mr. Brown’s experience to internalize that thought. Now I am not saying not to listen to, or read motivational speaker’s book… What I am saying is that being extrinsically motivated doesn’t last. Balk all you want but we all have read a book, seen a movie, heard a quote that fired us up and right then, we have decided it was time to make a change… Three days, two pizzas, three six packs and a bag of weed later, that “fired up” becomes a camp fire that you pissed on and abandoned… The real danger of that is we become calloused because we get motivated, lose it, get motivated and lose it, get motivated and lose it and one day we realize we are 100 pounds overweight, working a shit job we don’t really want, unhappy, unhealthy and life is just something we drag our ass through rather than experience it.

Fail enough times and it sticks folks, I hate like hell to point it out but unless your tenacity is that of a bulldog, you’re going to burn out. Sorry… Not sorry…

Let’s fix it. Now while extrinsic motivation is pretty much useless, we can get some tools from it. We can build a foundation made from the quotes, sound bites, speeches, books and Ted Talks we listen to.

Let me stop there for a second and share a personal experience with you. When I began this journey years ago, I got this idea that I could look good naked again… So I read some books, listened to some speeches and conceived “The Look Good Naked Project” with no fucking clue of how I was going to do that. This was my moment that I experienced extrinsic motivation. The project fell by the wayside time and time again over the span of a decade or more, but it stuck with me because I had some ideas in my head that belonged to other people. About six years ago, on the day after a rather over celebratory Thanksgiving, I stepped out of the shower and before I could grab my towel I caught a glimpse of myself in a full length mirror. The body that had been athletic, graceful and strong was now something that horrified me at that precise moment, my epiphany occurred. I burst into tears and “The Look Good Naked Project” metamorphosed from other people’s ideas to my objective, my intention… I was 40 pounds overweight, sick to my stomach, pasty skinned and at age 49, I was a candidate for heart attacks, diabetes, and cancer and in reality, a truly shitty, doctor filled end of life experience… I had decayed into a middle aged disaster. At that moment, my life changed. I had no idea how to change, what to do or who to talk to but I knew that I didn’t want to be what I was…

Now that I wrote that out, perhaps that is the key thing we all need to take away from this blog. I did not like who I was… When we describe ourselves, we say “I am…” Am is a transitive form of the verb “To Be” and that is how we describe our very existence. In the moment of time, I decided that I did not like my own existence. Perhaps the saddest statement a human being can make.

Change happens with epiphany.

Three years ago, I had a deterioration in my spine where my neck attaches to my thoracic spine. The doctor told me that exercise was out of the question. Now, had my motivation been extrinsic, I would have sat on that couch for the six months I was ordered to sit on and just gotten fatter than I was... However, I sat on that stupid couch, watched Maury (You are NOT the father!) and endless documentaries about health, ate 1,100 calories a day, and read upwards of 200 self help books from the library. To make a long story short, I didn't quit just because I couldn't continue the path I was on at the time. I switched paths and I learned so much that I changed the way I thought about life, health and being. My body became a reflection of my work. I sat on the couch and lost the final pounds I needed to lose. I fed my mind more than I fed my body and it changed the game for me. I became more like the person I envisioned in my head. Other people's ideas became the building blocks of desire to be better than I was. The Maury part was for entertainment because i don't think you can learn anything from that show except maybe don't sleep around without condoms because showing up on Maury for the fifth time to find out that guy number five also isn't the dad looks pretty miserable... Funny as fuck but still, not fun... So listen, start reading, listening to motivational speeches like this one and get your epiphany on, You will thank yourself later... I promise... 

That leads me to the other kind of motivation. Intrinsic motivation… It has the label of motivation but I personally don’t think that is a proper definition.

 mo·ti·va·tion

/ˌmōdəˈvāSH(ə)n/

 Noun

  1. the general desire or willingness of someone to do something.

  "keep the staff up to date to maintain interest and motivation"

 

I don’t think that even sounds like something that would change your life… So let me redefine intrinsic motivation as “Epiphanic Intent…” or “an unwavering determination driven by profound desire to not be what or who we are.”  We have all run into someone we used to know and they were nearly unrecognizable. The overweight person who isn’t overweight anymore or the alcoholic / drug addict who is now a glowing picture of health. These people may have been sparked by motivation to change but these profound transformations come from discipline.

I’ll close with this today. Like I said, someday I will be an old man, way sooner than I want but what I want is irrelevant. Time is relentless and death is certain but there is now, and now is of the utmost importance because now makes the memories for later and I right after I shit my pants for the first time, I want to laugh because I fought this motherfucker down to the last second. I intend to be learning something on my last exhalation… 

See you tomorrow…

Oh fuck, I forgot to give you the great news! Today, Saturday of all days, I woke up at 0530, got up, made my bed and did a complete ½ Murph in 33 minutes and 15 seconds… As I stepped up to do the fifth set I was crying, not sniffling, I was openly weeping because it hurt. If you think drinking or drugs is affecting your level of physical fitness, try stopping... Short term but way worse... Sometimes the suffering we experience is self-inflicted and that is just a truth of self-improvement. Change fucking hurts and if it doesn’t, you’re not doing it right…

 P90X will be the only thing I will not complete today but Monday is calling me like the Sirens of Titan… Monday will be the first day that I complete all of my challenges and that is my intent even if I have to shit my pants to do it…