No shit… I do… Since the pandemic started and I have been working from home, I make it a point to walk up to the mailbox. To get to the mailboxes, I have to pass this little patch of grass that has swings for the apartment complex kids and a large grass area like a little park in the middle of the apartments. A large percentage of the time, no lie, I have seen this kid in the park practicing soccer. I watched him for a couple of months and I usually waved at him and we exchanged nods and he went back to his footwork and I got the mail… Then I noticed that he was out all the time… He has equipment like cones and weird soccer shit spread out in the field. Occasionally he would be in the pool area trying to fish his soccer ball out of the pool… Always a smile, always a wave and one day I stopped to watch him and he stopped to see what I wanted. I asked him if he did this every day and he smiled really big and said “yeah”… I told him that his dedication was inspirational and I have never seen anything like before…We talked about daily workouts and diet and before we parted ways that day, I told him that his perseverance was amazing and he would do great things if he stayed the course. .. He is out there every day guys… I have watched him since last March… Rain, cold, heat, and fog… The fucking kid is out there dribbling that soccer ball through those cones, doing footwork, practicing, practicing and then practicing some more… Doesn’t matter the weather, and I’m guessing doesn’t matter how he feels… It was the only conversation I had with him but we still nod at one another because he knows my dedication to fitness and diet and I know his… We are like comrades in arms; a mental toughness that doesn’t know quit and doesn’t have much time to waste but I imagine if he does “waste” time, it’s on a soccer video game… I admire this kid… Over 12 months I have yet to fail to see him at least twice a week and I know he is out there every day… Yeah, admiration is in order here, he is like one of my inspirations in the fitness world and I see him doing great things because he has a mind to do it. A committed, dedicated, and focused approach to something he obviously loves…
So what do you love that much? I certainly wish that I had become aware of success at his age… They say it is never too late but the superstars of our world don’t start at age 55…
I don’t like to point out the obvious when it is painful but this is a child who has more focus than 99% of the adults I know. He isn’t supposed to have self control yet and you, as an adult are almost required to have it. He is kicking your ass… A kid… Internalize that for a minute. Sit back and consider that a child is out there every day, focused on something he loves to do and every day he gets a little better at it. Once I saw him walk circles around an older boy laughing as he did it… He dribbled the ball, kicked it between the older boy’s feet and did it with such ease it was amazing… It was the only time I saw anyone else interacting with him and I imagine many people don’t because no one likes to get their ass handed to them, especially by a much younger, obviously much more talented kid… So as much as I do not like to say shit about people, when I compare most of the people I know to this kid, there is no comparison… If there is such a thing as “merit” this kid is worthy of every positive comment we can make about him.
So let’s talk about dedication for a second…
Primarily, and most importantly, dedication is love. This is obvious. You cannot dedicate your life to something if you do not love it and I mean really, really love it. If you don’t love something then you have no chance to be dedicated to it because of the time and effort it takes. Yesterday, Tom Brady showed us the lifelong love of a game by winning his seventh Super Bowl… By himself Tom Brady has won almost 13% of every Super Bowl ever played… I think we can say that he loves football.
Passion comes next… You can love something and not be passionate about it… Dedication requires passion. You have to be excited about what you are doing, about the process, about the planning and about the results. There is a rush when you are really dedicated to doing something and you succeed. When you want to lose weight and the scale says that you are. When you perfect that spaghetti sauce or the notes ring out true from your guitar… That rush is what keeps you from quitting. No passion for what you want? Then you ain’t gonna get it, cowboy… No passion means half hearted and half hearted means mediocre performance… Nobody wants to go to see an event called “Really Average People With No Passion Get Together and Do Shit They Don’t Care About and Aren’t Good At…”
Dedication is time, a whole lot of time in fact. You don’t become dedicated to something by paying it lip service. You realize dedication because of the amount of time you spend doing it. You wouldn’t be considered dedicated to something if you spent just an hour a week on it; time and dedication go hand in hand. That kid playing soccer every day of his life is dedicated. I am dedicated. A couple hours a day spent bettering ourselves. Every day, no day off, no taking it easy…
Dedication is a parent who stays up all night with a sick child and works an eight hour shift. Dedication is getting up before the sun to exercise, or practicing in the rain. It’s bleeding, whether literal or metaphorical… Dedication is working out when you’re sore, playing guitar until your fingers go numb…
But mostly, dedication is about being proud of yourself. You may never rise to the performance level of Tom Brady, have musical skills like David Bowie or be ½ as famous as Matthew McConaughey but you can damn well have their passion… Find what you love and do it with all your heart, that’s all it takes. If you love to play the piano, imagine what 5 hours a week, 20 hours a month and 240 hours a year would give in skills? About 45 minutes per day and pretty soon, you will be impressive…
I dare you to give it a try…
Just a little about The Life Change Challenge that I am currently drowning in… I’m still working on a way to explain the cataclysmic upheaval in my life because of this last four weeks without sounding magnanimous about it… I haven’t won a Super Bowl and my name isn’t known worldwide but I would like to make the claim that I feel as physically good as any athlete can and as mentally healthy as I have ever been. That’s quite a assertion I know…
These last few weeks I have been:
1. Getting up at 5:21 AM (alarm at 5:21 and rise at 5:30 AM)
2. Doing a ½ Murph (150 squats, 100 Burpees, 100 push-ups, 50 pull-ups)
3. Doing P90X3
4. Plank Challenge
5. Daily meditation (15 to 20 minutes)
6. Daily guitar practice
7. Daily blogging
8. Fasting from 6:00 PM until 12:00 PM the next day
9. Not over eating
10. 100% whole food, plant based diet
11. No drugs
12. No alcohol
13. CBD Oil daily for inflammation
14. Daily vitamins and supplements
This is just my nature and I, even though suffering greatly for the first couple of weeks, have never been happier or prouder of myself than I have since taking this on… Now listen, this is years of preparing for this level of performance. I wasn’t lying on the couch 30 days ago… I have been creeping up on this event and preparing mentally for it for 6 years. I didn’t start out with anything more in mind than, I looked and feel like shit, and thought “this has to stop…” That’s all I had, man, seriously. I didn’t know a thing about holistic health and truthfully, I was a Neanderthal about health when I started… A whole lot of mistakes, misadventures, failure and injury came before this challenge. Ask me sometime about the $250 pineapple some time… This isn’t the last challenge either… The success of this one simply made me ask myself that if I can do this, what the fuck am I capable of? This has been a chain of events springing from one to another until I realized something … I have abilities that I simply did not know I had and guess what? ALL of you do too… You have something inside you that will astound you. Fuck being amazing in the eyes of others… Not important… Amaze yourself and you will find a joy you never knew…
I would venture to guess that with investigation of diet, health and self care, exercising and researching holistic health that I have spent roughly 10 hours a week working on this… For six years… That’s about 3,120 hours…
They say that if you invest 10,000 hours into something, you will become an expert… At this rate, I will be an expert on holistic health in about 12-13 years…
I have the time… What the fuck else am I doing? Hahahaha
Love ya… Mean it!
See you tomorrow…
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