No matter what. I could drop the mic there and leave. But I will not. Get this. Your brain does not function as well when you are inactive. You are not as productive and your thinking is not as sharp. I am not talking about being super fit and lifting all the weights and doing...
I know I go against all the best SEO/marketing practices. My blog posts are long, I don't have a lot of popular keywords, I don't give a nice summary in the form of three to four bullet points at the beginning, and I don't create a lot of rankings. Yup, I don't do that often. Instead, I start my blog post with a quote from an obscure Austrian write from the beginning of the 20th century. I know our attention spans are short, and we live now in the ethos of the busy life, and precisely because of that, I try to make sure that my three pages are worth your time and make you stop, think, and breathe. I hope you will find this post insightful and that it will help you have a nice break in this Thursday afternoon. Please read it and let me know how it goes!
Borges is one of those writers that is highly appreciated yet poorly understood. You might have heard of him, but probably you haven’t read his writings. His work reminds me of David Bowie. There is this aura of bizarreness that covers it. It makes it seem disruptive and avant-garde. Yet it’s simple, classic, and universal....
I remember the day I spent a full hour talking to an advertiser about creating my own personal brand. It was like if your uncle Phil who just started jogging spent an hour talking to your friend Jody the ultramarathoner about the importance of having the right running shoes. I did not know the concept at that time, but I was deep in my research of the printing press in the seventeenth century. What I was learning was that most writers of the time had a strong sense of branding. They understood their books as objects in themselves and so they cared about every little aspect of them. They usually would include a self portrait in each of their books. Those portraits, man! They were quite literally an intellectual coat of arms. Everything had a meaning and everything was there for a reason. No contemporary nobel prize winner has ever thought so deeply about the cover of one of their books. The cool thing for me is that there was no pretense that they did not care about material, venial, graphical, or commercial things. They put themselves out there and they wanted people to understand them exactly and fully as they were. The advertiser I was talking to looked at me and with a duh-but-warm smile and said: “yeah, it is all about personal branding.” My head exploded a little.
This week's video is very useful. It is about all those things on the title and more. The main goal is to give you a framework and some tools on how to analyze your own behaviors. Understanding compassion as a physiological state and how to better use your fitness trackers is half the point.
Confidence is not an end-point. Confidence is based on habit -the folks at Harvard Business Review have it right. You see, the main thing is that confidence is the trust you have in yourself. It is not how much you weigh, or your marathon time. Roger is not waiting to win the Olympic gold to feel confident, on the other hand, he might win it because he is. Your weight or your marathon time will not give you confidence. Trust is not built on one particular outcome. Trust is built on regular delivery.
What matters is that staying true to your own self is hard. It takes work, and it does not come easy. Quite the opposite, what comes naturally is often not who you want to be. Recording all those videos is easy. Polishing and sharing them is hard. Yet who I want to be is not a video-journaler, I want to be a guide who helps others to be more faithful to themselves by sharing what I have learned in as many mediums (it should be media, but that's confusing) as I can.
I love coaching, I love training. I have spent several years of my life in higher education institutions earning various degrees. However it’s in the gym that I have learned the most. Watching people sweat, talking about food, feelings, and the biomechanics of the squat, is where I have seen the most epic battles, and where I have had the biggest impact. I love it. Nonetheless there is one aspect of training/coaching that I have not yet learned how to address very well and that bothers me constantly. This post is an attempt to start changing that.
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”.)