Having grit and being committed are essential ingredients in powering through to achieving goals. Without them, difficulties and obstacles may be too great to overcome.
I got this email the other day, so thought I’d share it, because it’s message is important in this respect…
The other day I finally picked up my gym routine again, after a 6-week hiatus.
And let me tell ‘ya it wasn’t a pretty sight:
My my first squat rep made me feel a little woozy.
By the third rep I’m red-faced…
And after the whole set I’m wobbling on my feet with tinnitus ringing in my ears, ready to faint then and there.
What gives??
This comment from a reader made me re-live that unfortunate gym experience:
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In my life, I’ve probably picked up and dropped programming again a dozen times in total (yes, persistence is my weakness in that respect).
And every time I saw marked improvements if doing a bit of it every single day and saw decline if leaving it alone for so much as a week.
~~~
Here’s my take on this:
Whether you’re learning how to program with Python, you just ate a slice of humble pie at the squat rack, or if you want to learn how to cook a decent meal from scratch—
These are all “use it or lose it” kind of skills:
The more you do them, the better you get. The less you do them, the worse you get.
It’s a law of nature.
And if you drop the ball—don’t beat yourself up too much.
The truth is, we’re all TOGETHER in this constant struggle against entropy:
I looked like a complete tool at the gym? So what. Since then 2 weeks have passed and now I’m back where I was before my break.
It’s been a while since I built a web scraper in Python? Well, the next time I need to write one I’ll just have to do a few hours of research first.
My point is this—
You can ALWAYS recover from a setback.
In fact, the ability to recover from setbacks is vastly more important than talent or a perfect attendance record.
Because sooner or later you WILL need it to achieve your goals.
Grit is worth cultivating.
For more posts about commitment click here.