Check Yourself

Have I met you yet?  Are you content being the person you are?  Is everyday a challenge?  Or do you challenge every day?  The last thing I would want is to be satisfied with where I am, whether it is in CrossFit or in life.  Being satisfied leads to idleness and idleness leads to decrepitude.  It takes a long time and is a very long journey from ruin to shrine. 

Puzzled by what is being said?

You have to push yourself day in and day out.  Relaxing is a part of the journey that comes from having done hard work, not just from work itself.  If you go to the box for 3 days, did you push yourself all three days?  If you worked at your job for 5 days (which is common for most people) did you push yourself?  In those 3 days of working out or 5 days at your job – did you achieve anything?  Achievements are very easy to discern, they are written and you literally accomplished a goal or you haven’t.  So is the rest day, or in the case of real-life work - the weekend, something you take for granted or something you deserved?

If nothing was achieved or nothing was done to achieve something in the future, then aren’t you just wasting time?  The last thing anyone wants to do is waste time, theirs or anyone else’s.

Let’s put satisfied aside for now, you are satisfied when something meets your expectation.  We should be pushing for that line when something goes above and beyond your expectations, also known as delighters.  When was the last time you were delighted?  It is something I have seen that is very common in individuals that get their first muscle-up, when someone lifts a weight that they initially thought was unachievable, and most importantly when someone works really hard and gets an unthought-of positive result. 

It’s time for a movie check, since we have been so long from it.  Take for instance the 1993 hit, Cool Runnings, where Derice Bannock doesn’t qualify for the Olympics in the 100-Yard Sprint due to an accident but is determined to go to the Olympics and finds a Bobsled coach on the island of Jamaica.  With much persistency, determination, and a vigorous nature, a great many things happen for Derice and his 3 teammates.  I won’t do a spoiler alert for this movie, but it has the lesson we cover today.

“One of the great undiscovered joys of life comes from doing everything one attempts to the best of one's ability. There is a special sense of satisfaction, a pride in surveying such a work, a work which is rounded, full, exact, complete in its parts, which the superficial person who leaves his or her work in a slovenly, slipshod, half-finished condition, can never know. It is this conscientious completeness which turns any work into art. The smallest task, well done, becomes a miracle of achievement.”
Og Mandino

-Coach Tony