Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Motivation Monday: Are You "Voting" the Way You Know You Should?

Episode Date: July 27, 2020

This episode is part of a weekly series that I have dubbed “Motivation Monday.”  (Yes, I know, very creative of me. What can I say, I’m a genius…) Seriously though, the idea here is simple: Every Monday morning, I’m going to post a short and punchy episode that I hope gets you fired up to tackle the workouts, work, and everything else that you have planned for the week ahead. As we all know, it’s one thing to know what you want to do, but it’s something else altogether to actually make yourself do it, and I hope that this series gives you a jolt of inspiration, energy, and encouragement to get at it. So, if you like what you hear, then make sure to check back every Monday morning for the latest and greatest installment. --- Mentioned on The Show: Books by Mike Matthews: https://legionathletics.com/products/books/ --- Want to get my best advice on how to gain muscle and strength and lose fat faster? Sign up for my free newsletter! Click HERE: https://legionathletics.com/signup/

Show me a great achiever in any field or activity and I'll show you a master of habit and routine. As the hedge fund maestro Ray Dalio put it in his book Principles, while there might be more glamour in coming up with the brilliant new ideas, most of success comes from doing the mundane and often distasteful stuff like identifying and dealing with problems and pushing hard over a long time. Consider this. Pick a sphere or an activity in which you would like to improve. Simple. It could be fitness, finances, feather painting, whatever. Now, if you could get better by a mere 1% every day for a year straight, how much progress will you have made by the time you're done?

The answer might surprise you because you will be 37 times better than when you started. This is the power of compound interest applied to life, which produces not arithmetic but geometric progression over time. but geometric progression over time. Thus, an apparently insignificant, unnoticeable change repeated often enough can produce exponential growth or decay. What's more, this principle is as inescapable as gravity. It is either working for or against you every minute of every day and in your every interaction with life. Everything is in a state of flux. It's always getting better or getting worse. It's never remaining exactly the same. And the only way to wield this double-edged weapon is with habits that accrue to you grain by grain the rich harvests you seek. This is the secret to overnight successes and surprising collapses, which are just striking manifestations of gradual accumulation.

They're not sudden seismic shifts. Think the snowflakes that eventually turn into the avalanche. And so consider again the area you want to improve in and ask yourself, what am I doing every day to accomplish this? If you don't have a good answer, it is time to reconsider your priorities, my friend, because your daily actions, your routine will mostly determine the trajectory of your life. Just 45 minutes of exercise every day can banish disease and dysfunction, for example. Just 30 minutes of reading every day can turn you into an expert in just about anything. Just a few hours of deep work, to use Cal Newport term, every single day can produce a legacy over your lifetime.

As James Clear says in his book, Atomic Habits, every action is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. Are you voting the way you know you should? All right, well, that's it for this episode. I hope you enjoyed it and found it interesting and helpful. And if you did, and you don't mind doing me a favor, please do leave a quick review on iTunes or wherever you're listening to me from in whichever app you're listening to me in, because that not only convinces people that they should check out the show, it also increases search visibility and thus it helps more people find their way to me and learn how to get fitter, leaner, stronger, People find their way to me and learn how to get fitter, leaner, stronger, healthier, and happier as well. And of course, if you want to be notified when the next episode goes live,

then simply subscribe to the podcast and you won't miss out on any new stuff. And if you didn't like something about the show, please do shoot me an email at mike at muscleforlife.com, just muscle, please do shoot me an email at mike at muscleforlife.com, just muscle, F-O-R, life.com, and share your thoughts on how I can do this better. I read everything myself and I'm always looking for constructive feedback, even if it is criticism, I'm open to it. And of course you can email me

if you have positive feedback as well, or if you have questions really relating to anything that you think I could help you with, definitely send me an email. positive feedback as well. Or if you have questions really relating to anything that you think I could help you with, definitely send me an email. That is the best way to get ahold of me, mikeatmuscleforlife.com. And that's it. Thanks again for listening to this episode. And I hope to hear from you soon.