Stop Taking Yourself So Seriously

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Oh, This is the Music Makers podcast where I read things out loud to you and then offer my unqualified opinions Stop Taking Yourself So Seriously by Dan Shipper. My workout plan this summer would make any fitness guru shudder. I try to go to the gym once or twice a week. I spend 25 minutes there. I run for a mile, do some curls, and then finish off with a dumbbell bench press.

It's an admittedly ridiculous routine that does very little for my overall fitness, but I don't care. I don't care because I've been down this road before. I decide I'm going to start working out again, and I take myself very seriously. I become a workout planning god. I research routines, buy supplements, construct a schedule, and pick a start date.

Then I go to the gym every day. By the end of week 2, I invariably give up. My current workout routine seems lackadaisical because it is lackadaisical, but intentionally so. That's because it's designed to naturally evolve. Here's what I know is going to happen.

I'll get accustomed to going to the gym every now and then and doing a little bit of whatever I feel like. After a month or so, I'll be at the gym at the end of my normal workout and say, hey. Why don't I do some legs? And then I'll start doing legs. After a month of that, I'll be finishing up my curls and say to myself, hey.

Why don't I do some triceps? And so I'll add triceps to the routine. Then I'll start adding days to my routine. Mondays Wednesdays are arms and back. Tuesdays Thursdays are legs.

Pretty soon, going to the gym once a week, whenever I feel like it, will have transformed into a 5 day a week habit. I know this because I worked out 5 days a week for the entirety of my senior year of high school. I wish I could say I committed to 5 days a week from the very beginning. But in reality, the fact that I was working out so much happened pretty much by accident. I just ended up in the gym one morning without any expectations.

For some reason, I came back the next week and then the week after that. Finally, I looked up and realized that I was working out a lot, so I started optimizing. I researched routines and slowly started implementing them. It was a low stress organic process, and by the end of the year, I was in the best shape I'd ever been in. Here's the problem with taking yourself too seriously.

Every experience you have can potentially jeopardize your self importance. When your self importance is jeopardized, you become defensive, and then eventually stop doing whatever it was you were trying to get good at. When you're taking yourself too seriously, you tend to do 2 things. You tend to model yourself after very successful people and refuse to take advice from others. Hypothetically, let's imagine I'm serious about working out.

Because of this, I need a very serious role model to copy. I settle on Arnold Schwarzenegger. I read his Wikipedia page. I watch Pumping Iron, and I take away something like the following. On Mondays Fridays, Arnold did squats, dead lifts, and bench presses.

Then on Wednesdays, Arnold did squats, bent rows, and power cleans. Arnold also took creatine 3 days a week to boost his muscle mass. Looking at this, what's the most immediate, clearly accessible thing to do to get me closer to becoming Arnold? The creatine, of course. So I drive over to g and c, buy a big bucket of creatine, and come home satisfied.

I'm at least 30% of the way to becoming the next governor of California. Right? Wrong. What I think I've done is taken one of the things that made Arnold successful and applied it to myself. What I've actually done is taken something that's merely associated with success and assumed that it actually leads to success.

Successful bodybuilders may take creatine, but taking creatine doesn't make them successful. It's just a more visible component of success than, say, showing up every day. Showing up every day is very interesting because it's the least visible indicator of success. No successful person tallies how much they show up every day, but other less important things that are merely associated with success are easy to convey and thus more visible, like taking creatine. So we tend to latch onto those and think of them as leading to success.

Buying creatine to become a body builder is like making someone sign an NDA to become a successful entrepreneur. What do very accomplished, very smart people do when they come up with a good idea? They write NDAs and make people sign them to hear what they have to say. What do people who take themselves too seriously do when they're getting into business and want to model themselves after smart and successful people? They make people sign NDAs.

An NDA is sometimes a signal of a good idea. When a very big company is working on a big new product, you'll probably have to sign an NDA to get access to it. Because NDAs are sometimes associated with good ideas, it's easy to make the assumption that any idea with an NDA must be good. Therefore, because we came up with an idea and we're very serious about it, it must require an NDA. But here's where taking yourself too seriously really gets you into trouble.

Let's say you're very serious about your start up, and you ask someone to sign an NDA before you pitch to them. If they refuse, it not only reflects badly on your idea, which you think is amazing, it also reflects badly on you, and worst of all, your level of seriousness. If you're taking yourself seriously, this is crushing. So you end up yelling at the person trying to give you advice. The conversation has ended and you sit there with your unsigned NDA having learned nothing.

Taking yourself too seriously when you work out is similar. You show up on the 1st day proudly sporting your creatine shake. You have a checklist in hand containing the exact workout Arnold used to do. You manage to get through the squats, but you're now sweating bullets. Next up is the Bent Rows.

This particular exercise is the most excruciating physical activity you've ever done in your life. By the time you get to the Power Cleans, you can't take it anymore. You throw your shake in the garbage and storm out of the gym. You probably weren't cut out to be a bodybuilder anyway. Meanwhile, I just finished with the treadmill, and I'm about to do my 10 minutes of free weights before I get on with my day.

And hey, maybe I don't feel like doing curls today. That's fine. I know. I'll be back next week. This article gives me a lot of comfort because I've been there.

We've all been there. We've all packed our proverbial bag the night before. We've picked out our favorite workout music, the stuff that's gonna get us pumped up, and we're almost excited to wake up super early to go to the gym the first time. Maybe even the second or third time, but invariably, it fizzles out. We're not we're no longer excited to wake up early in the morning and go to the gym.

We don't wanna pack our bag at night. We don't care what music we listen to because everything is stupid. Going to the gym is stupid and waking up early is stupid. And it's almost like the more preparation we put in upfront before we even start, the harder it is to sustain whatever it is we're trying to do. So if you go out and buy all new workout gear before you even start working out, that puts a lot of pressure, at least on me, to be super serious about working out because now I gotta justify all this gear I just bought.

But, unfortunately, the preparation is not the work. It's just like the author said, getting the creatine is not the hard part. The hard part is showing up every single day. Buying new shoes and picking out cool workout clothes and all the stuff you do upfront before you actually start the work, All of that is fun, but the work itself, whether it's working out or writing a book or whatever it is, the work itself is not glamorous. A lot of times, the work itself isn't fun.

The work itself is just plain hard. You just have to struggle through that creation phase. We love watching movies because there are montages. It takes 6 months or a year's worth of work, and it puts it into 30 seconds with an awesome background track. That's not real.

We don't get that in real life. But how often do our brains play that for us before we even get started? We have visions of us finishing the book or being super strong, but our brain somehow doesn't give us any visions of spending 6 months sweaty in the gym, but that's where the real work is done. The real work is done in that slog in the middle. Seth Godin calls it the dip.

It's after all of your excitement has worn off and things are just hard, but that's where the magic happens because that's where most people give up. Most people won't. Most people won't go through the dip. Most people won't keep going when it gets hard. Most people won't continue to show up.

The best part of this whole article is the very last paragraph where he says you show up with your creatine shake in hand, you've got Arnold Schwarzenegger's exact workout on a piece of paper so you can follow it, and you don't make it, and you never come back. Meanwhile, I'm over here doing my super lame workout, but you know what? I'll be back next week. So here's what I wanna challenge you to do. Decrease your focus on the goal, and increase your focus on the system.

We start out with this goal in mind, and it's usually a goal of perfection. And that's a super dangerous place to be, because when we mess up even by a little bit, we've fallen short of our goal of perfection, and we give up. So focus more on the system. If your goal is to write the next great American novel, what you should really be focusing on is writing. You should be focusing on writing every day.

If your goal is to be super fit, you should be focusing on going to the gym. That's your system. So maybe you write a single page. Maybe you run on the treadmill for 10 minutes. Maybe you make one sales call.

That's good. Don't take yourself too seriously. Do it today. Do it tomorrow. Just keep going.

The Musicmakers podcast is released twice weekly on Mondays Thursdays at 10 AM CST. Here's a sneak peek from the next episode. Find the time. As you become better and better at finding the time, you'll notice people saying, when did you have time for this? And you'll smile.

You can subscribe in Itunes by searching for the Music Makers, or visit us online by going to musicmakers.fm. And as always, you can reach me at aaron@musicmakers.fm.