Close the gap

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    Just Chill, Commit to Mastery

    ByJuan Acevedo

    No matter what skill you choose, you can visualize mastery. You can see it. Now imagine what it would take to get there... I bet that in your visualization that mastery does not happen in 6 months. In my mind’s eye I can see myself creating awful noises for quite some time before actually playing a tune. I imagine that if your thing was to master German, in your vision you can see yourself stumbling through words before you can actually write amazingly good emails. By the same token, I bet that if you imagine your teachers for that journey, you don’t see slicky guys selling you fast results or trying to trap you with hard sells and gimicky marketing. In that vision, mastery is a continuous, long, and difficult process of learning. It’s slow and tedious. This is why it’s so rare. (In other words, mastery is what Hollywood movies show in a super fast montage with the subscript “five years later”.)

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    Why train?

    ByJuan Acevedo

    In the world of fitness it’s common to hear that you should find a “why” for your training. The idea behind this practice is to find an emotional connection to some part of your identity to use as motivation whenever you feel like you want to throw in the towel, or not get out of bed for your morning workout. Although this can be very useful, it is also the source of a plethora of cheesy motivational memes and worse, it comes with the assumption that exercise is inherently good for our health and all we need is more motivation and willpower. This seems like an innocent idea but it is NOT. This way of thinking takes from us the opportunity to question the physiological purpose of our training, and in doing so set us up for failure before we even start, regardless of how many hours of sweat we put in. I believe that this is the kind of “why” we should identify. Let me explain.