I Hate Running
And Other Tales
I think if I tried real hard I could probably remember the first time I ran a mile. Even as a young person if I was just trying to run for the sake of running, I would push myself too hard and gas out. I couldn’t continue to run because physically I just hadn’t conditioned myself for it. With my failed attempts at running a mile, I began to tell myself a story that I was not physically fit. I’m not that strong. You see, I was pretty skinny. So in looking at me visually, you would think, “This guy’s a runner.” However, the fact is that I was hardly a runner. I hadn’t conditioned myself to run more than a short sprint.
Being physically fit intrigued me from a young age. I wanted to be strong and in shape. Therefore, I would get on a 3, 4, 5-day kick of working out. I would decide that I was going to lift weights and get strong. In my mind, if I did those things I could start on the football team ,or I could become a wrestler. Whatever sport sparked my interest at the time regarding being fit was usually not enough to hold my interest. Whatever my whimsical desire was that week, I would pursue it with a whimsical pursuit. Going up into the weight room would result in me doing the lifts that felt natural to me. Of course I gravitated toward lifts that made me feel strong. In the gym I would do stuff like the calf raise machine or the lat pull down machine. These exercises I could do without enhancing how weak I truly was. It was extremely discouraging for me to even grace the door of the weight room. Naturally, I avoided the more basic lifts. You would not have caught me doing dead lifts. Heaven forbid me to try weighted squats. The bench press was extremely intimidating. In my mind the worst thing about a gym was cardiovascular activity. You would NEVER catch me doing any of that, EVER!
Most of the people who are reading this have kind of figured out where you are physically. If being in shape physically is not it is easy for you, then we are similar. I have to work to obtain the physical strength that I feel is mandatory for me to be successful. At this point, you need to look in the mirror for an honest self evaluation. You may think your body is on fire and I’m right where I need to be, or you may look in the mirror and think I’m not where I want to be yet. Either way, you are the deciding factor in your physical appearance. It is completely up to you.
A self evaluation is essential. No one else will be completely honest with you. If you’re completely broken down when you look in the mirror because of your physical attributes, that is okay. It gives you a starting point. If you think your body looks like total crap and you hate to look at yourself, then it is time to make a change. Truly assessing where you are visually. Don’t allow your mental track to switch to something that’s more palpable, something that doesn’t require you to listen to that nagging voice in the back of your head that is screaming for change. I know that you really do want to be the best version of yourself that is possible! Do not allow your mind to wander onto easier subjects like: What do I have going on today? What do the kids want me to do? What’s the wife got planned for me? The fact is this; the very healthiest thing you can do is look in the mirror and realize exactly where you are today. Ask yourself if you are someplace physically that puts you in a position of power?
This isn’t a short chapter because it is vital to your success. You need to truly understand how your physicality affects your pursuit of greatness. For me, I’m not trying to be a body builder. I’m not trying to be a marathon runner. I’m not trying to be a power lifter. I don’t think that I have any chance ever of being a male fitness model. I am your average 200-210 pound, a little on the bigger build, guy. I can run a couple miles. I can bench press 225 extremely consistently. I can dead lift between 350 and 400 pounds, and I can squat somewhere around 250 to 300. This data about myself helps me to set goals and pursue the best me possible. It literally sets me up for success every day.
I’m only sharing these statistics with you because I don’t think that you have to choose to be obsessed with your physicality. Working out puts you in a position of power that allows you to have the ability to push yourself physically in order to defeat that little weak voice in your mind. What do I mean by that? Your mind has the ability to literally walk through any fire. However, in our life beginning with the time that we were extremely small our parents catered to our every whimsical scream and cry, want, and desire. If we cried they were quick to pacify us. If we showed any kind of discomforted emotions as we grow up, the people around us want us to shut up, so they fix it. They don’t want a crying 3-year-old in the room. Most people have the mentality to give that kid what they want or scold them and teach them to swallow those desires and make the noise disappear. The problem is that as young people grow into adults they are rarely retaught this lesson and the crying baby voice in the back of their head grows stronger and stronger. As they progress through life they grow and get older, they do the same thing. They cry for what they want, but that weak little voice gets a new trick. It learns to pacify itself with lies! Your mind builds a mechanism that is programmed like this: if I can’t get what I want, then I create a story that justifies why I can’t get it. The voice now starts telling you lies. Lies like: It’s never my fault. Whatever is bothering you is never the result of your own actions, always the result of someone else’s. The consequences you are facing are always the result of the economy, the weather, John did this, Jane did that, even Sally never gave me a chance.
You are likely wondering how does this have anything to do with my physicality? It’s simple. Every time you push yourself in a workout, you break that weak voice down more and more. Soon the stronger voice in your head replaces the lies with truths. As you continuously stomp that weaker voice out through pushing yourself physically, you will notice the stronger voice in your head replacing lies with truths. Normally, the same simple truth. “I didn’t accomplish that, or I didn’t obtain that because of me. No one else is responsible for my shortcomings. It’s no one’s fault but mine!” Your mind, because you’ve been conditioned to operate this way your entire life, is now broken. Your mind prevents you from walking through discomfort. Your mind prevents you from walking through pain. Your mind prevents you from being willing to track through whatever it is that you’ve got going on in your life.
God gives us these amazing gifts. Although, many of gifts that we’ve been given aren’t visually scalable. Our bodies, inside of this conversation, are externally scalable. Unfortunately most people exercise their body for vanity instead of power. When you’re working out, you need to push yourself mentally to a place that you’re miserable. The entire point of the misery isn’t to physically look like a specimen, but instead train your mind. Your mind needs to be trained to walk through discomfort and not to quit early. You must work to train your body to get through to the other side of the discomfort to the reward of success. You see in the conversation of scale, business, and the wealthy, your objective is to be able to walk through the fire and come out successful on the other side.
Working out becomes a vehicle to exercise a muscle that you can’t see. Working out becomes a vehicle to exercise your will, your heart, and your mind’s capacity to disconnect to the discomforts of our body. Working out increases your ability to work past the discomforts of the stories and accomplish whatever goal you set your mind to. Foundationally, this is an area that you must master. There will be road blocks. I had stories. When I was a small child the story I thought was I can’t run, and I’m not very strong. Those were stories that blocked me from moving forward to make progress.
It wasn’t until much later in life that I realized that if I could squash the stories, I could accelerate my growth. Most of my mentors, my close inner circle mentors aren’t physical specimens of masculinity. My grandfather, as we talked about lots of times, was a worker. However, even until he was dying at the age of 87, he was a thin man. Grandpa was 6’2” and weighed somewhere around 150-160 pounds. At his heaviest weight of his life maybe he got up to 175 pounds.
I don’t know if my grandfather in th
e last 50 years of his life spent one day inside of a weight room or a gym. I do know that every single day he was outside working and grinding physically. The military had given him the fortitude mentally to understand objectives and to disconnect his own emotional desires. The military also taught him to persevere regardless of what he felt internally and to disconnect to what he felt emotionally. You’ll find that a lot of soldiers have the ability to do the work that no one else wants to do. Most military soldiers can accomplish success without complaining because they’ve been broken from this mental capacity of incompletion of a task. They are not capable of functioning at a level of doing only what feels good.
Another mentor that I have, I’ve not seen in the gym. I’ve never seen my father-in-law workout. In the last 20 years of my relationship with him, he’s taught me multitudes about business and multitudes about discipline. He smoked cigarettes early in his lifetime. Fortunately, the second that the Surgeon General came out with a warning on the side of the pack about cigarettes giving you cancer, he wadded up and threw that half a pack of cigarettes in the trash. He had the discipline to never smoke again.
Drinking was the same way for my father in law. He decided somewhere in his 40s that drinking alcohol wasn’t good for him. He decided that he wasn’t going to do it again. He had the mental fortitude to resolve that this doesn’t benefit me in my goals. He realized that cigarettes and alcohol were stumbling blocks between him and his goals. What were his goals you ask? His goals were to build extreme wealth and to live a long fulfilling life.
This is what exercise does for you. Exercise builds the platform for you to have the mental fortitude to accomplish whatever your goal may be. Exercise causes you to have discipline in your life. It causes you to push past the uncomfortable feelings. You may have soreness, but you must persevere. You might want to quit, but you must persevere. You might be injured, but you must persevere. You might be crazy busy, but you must persevere. You owe it to yourself to learn to defeat that weak little voice that you have been a slave to the greater part of your life. Exercise expands your mind and your vision in a necessary way for success.
You may have stumbling blocks in your life between you and your goals. Maybe you need to quit smoking or maybe you need to lose weight. Both of these things are mentally and physically taxing. If you succumb to every whimsical desire that you have internally, you’ll never scale to a point in any level of wealth. This is a harsh reality that is difficult to accept.
Now you might be thinking, Michael I know some fat guys who smoke and who are extremely wealthy. Absolutely that can happen. However, is that helping you reach your goals. The object of what we are doing through this walk is stacking the deck in your favor. I want you set up for success. You might have a superpower that can add so much value to the marketplace, that the marketplace will make you rich. I am trying to help you take down the roadblocks to enable you to rocket to your next level.
You might be like me and be able to communicate yourself into and out of any situation. I have the ability to negotiate at whatever level required in a situation to produce. For me communication is my ultimate superpower. My physicality isn’t my superpower. However, my physicality is where I stretch and stress my mental fortitude. My physical preparation in the gym prepares me to walk into a difficult situation and not be gassed. The physical stamina that I work for in the gym allows me to have the mental fortitude to endure through any situation. I have the capability to not allow the rhythmic increase of my heart to cause me to be out of breath when I’m giving a keynote speech to an unforgiving audience.
I see so many people that as they’re settling into their comfort zone inside of a public speaking forum. They seem like they’re out of breath the first three or four paragraphs of their speech. They haven’t been able to disconnect their mental ability from the physical angst of being in discomfort. This all ties back to why creating an environment for your body that taxes it is so important.
Garret J. White with Wake Up Warrior says, “Sweat every day. Get your body in power.” Nevertheless, I want you to understand this concept deeper and have a clear understanding of why. Sweating everyday represents the action of moving. It represents your willingness to deny that weak voice in your mind and crush your goals. I have said this already, but I need it to sink in for you. Write this in the margin, or in the front of the book. Post it on social media. Tell a friend. Do whatever you have to do to engrain this concept in your mind. The most important benefit of pushing yourself physically isn’t something that you can see. Your success truly comes from learning to defeat the little voice in your mind. If you want to 10X the likely hood of you obtaining wealth or busting through that thing that is holding you back, learn and apply this lesson.
Why do successful people always look so good? Physically if you notice that most people who are extremely wealthy, not who make a good living, but people who have a high, high net worth, why do they physically look so fit? It’s because there’s a direct correlation to our physicality and our mental fortitude. Successful people make time to take care of their personal temple.
So what does being healthy do for us? I think that for me, and for most people in my inner circle, being physically fit removes one of the stresses and pressures from our world. We recognize that our physicality is one of the pillars of our success. It’s the easiest win we can get every single day. Savvy?
Crossfit
Learn To Move The Weight
I enjoy being a member of the Crossfit community. Am I trying to win the Crossfit games? No way. Am I trying to compete at a high level, crushing everyone else in the box? Not at all. My goal is simply to push myself to a level of discomfort. My main objective is to keep myself at that level of discomfort, until I accomplish the WOD (Workout Of the Day). I mark that little check mark of victory at the end of every WOD, and then I go on about the rest of my day. Sometimes reminding myself of that victory as my day goes into the toilet, because you inevitably will have lots of those days that everything feels like it is derailing.
I gain power in my day by reminding myself in those moments, hey, I’ve already had a victory today. This isn’t any harder than what I went through this morning. Focus on what’s happening. Separate the problem. Tackle the goal and see it through to the end.
Using my Crossfit example, the weight typically is the problem. A typical WOD requires some heavy lifting. Here is an example of a WOD I have completed recently. It starts with overhead squats at 135 pounds, 20 times. The next move is to run 400 meters. Finally we end with doing some pull ups. Guess what we do next? You guessed it, we repeat the set! We end up doing this same routine for 5 rounds and a timed score. The times are posted for all to see at the gym.
That particular WOD was a challenge. The 135 pound weight inside of the overhead squat is the problem for me. The weight that I carry throughout the run is the problem. The weight that I’m pulling up over the bar is the problem. I have to recognize that I have three different problems in the course of action and it’s a pretty consistent fight to get through to the end goal. Do that five times and call it a day. What was my time? Next time I have the same problem, can I do it quicker?
Now, take that exact same analogy and apply it over to business. You have an unhappy customer. Someone is discontent with the product or service that you’ve offered or that your company has offered. The struggle from the Crossfit analogy applies perfectly in business.
What’s the weight in this situation? The weight is the customer’s unhappy. Where are you? You are in a miserable spot because whether customers want to believe it or not, theres not an entrepreneur in the world who goes through what we go through without caring about the customer. Moving the customer from a point of frustration to a place of satisfaction is the WOD. The same as a workout, the more times you do it, the easier it becomes and your time might even get better too!
I’ve had some customers imply that businesses just care about money and at the end of the money we’re d
one. But that is simply not true. The customers happiness is one of our weights. Entrepreneurs like myself, truly care about people, their customers, and the happiness of the customer.
Do we care about making money? Absolutely we care about the almighty dollar. Is that one of the weights? It absolutely is. The functionality of our team and our team’s success individualized or as a group is as top priority. We look at our team and that is the weight. Are they happy? Are they making enough money? Are they fulfilling their role inside of the machine that I’ve built? For some of you it’s just as simple as, does my team even show up consistently? For some of you right now, the weight is I need to create a team. Owning your own operation will cause all of these things to tax you.
Being a business owner will cause all of these things to stress your body. All of these things will stress your mind. All of these things will add pressure to you as you build them. As your company grows, so does the pressure. As you reach higher and higher levels so does the urgency. Why in the world wouldn’t you ever work out your physical body? Why wouldn’t you push yourself hard in a workout to a point of almost physical exhaustion? A physical breakdown may not seem like a vacation, but the benefits you will gain from it are tremendous. Not because it’s an exercise of the body, but because it’s an exercise of both the mind and the spirit.
You have to choose to operate inside of power. That power comes from rolling out of bed and starting your day correctly. That power comes when you push your body to a point of discomfort and keep it there for a period of time first thing in the morning. I’m gonna give you some benchmarks, some things that I look for inside of my physical capacity, just as a benchmark to keep me on point. I haven’t 100% reached these goals to the fullest, but this is my pursuit. This is a little bit beyond what my current reach is. However, these have scaled and pushed further and further out over the last several years as I’ve realized how mentally I can push myself to the point of exhaustion. I can push myself to a point of failure and still maintain a level of being able to track my progress.
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