Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Motivation Monday: Excuses or Progress: Choose One

Episode Date: January 15, 2018

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. 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: www.muscleforlife.com/signup/

excuses are a very harsh mistress they are like the lotus fruit in homer's odyssey excuses have a narcotic effect they sap us of our spirit and our desires hey this is mike from muscle for life and welcome to another episode of my podcast this episode is part of a weekly series that I have dubbed Motivation Monday. Yes, I know, so creative of me. What can I say? I'm just a genius. Seriously though, the idea here is simple. Every Monday morning, I am 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. Because 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 energy and encouragement to go ahead and do all of those things that you want to do. So if you like what you hear, then make sure to check back every Monday morning for the latest and greatest installment. Okay, so let's start this week with a quote as usual. And this one is on the topic at hand, actually. It's from Benjamin Franklin. He said that he that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else. One day, we say that we're going to live a beautiful life. We're going to live the best life. We're going to wake up at the best time every morning. We're going to do the best workouts. We're going to eat the best foods

and we're going to do the best things with all of the best people. One day we say, we're going to lose that belly fat once and for all. We're going to learn that instrument. We're going to get that corner office. We're going to write that poem about the goat that screwed the pumpkin. Yes, I know about that. The kicker though, is that that day is never going to come because it's always tomorrow. It's always next week, next year, next lifetime. There are always excuses why today isn't that day. So whenever we say that, well, I would do X, but I can't because of Y, it's almost always bullshit unless Y is, I really don't want to. And that's what most everything in life that matters really comes down to. Necessity, the mother of all invention, as it's said. The reality is there's probably very little that we are actually incapable of.

There's only our sense of urgency and our willingness to act. And when we lie to ourselves, and when we say otherwise, what we're really saying is that we find alibis more attractive than achievements, that we find excuses more seductive than excellence, and that we find comfort more desirable than challenge. And it's understandable. We do this because excuses are seductive. They promise freedom from pain. They promise freedom from embarrassment, freedom from failure. They can lull us into letting ourselves off the hook. The reality is without excuses, we have to face the things that we don't want to face. And we have to do the things that we don't want to do. We have to go out there and put ourselves on the line every day.

And we have to prove every day that we're still worthy of our station. Without excuses, having done and having been is never enough. We have to continue doing. We have to continue becoming. And we have to continue living up to our standards. It also doesn't help that the world loves to offer us excuses. People can't wait to justify our shortcomings and our shortfalls for us and thereby attempt to absolve themselves of their own shortcomings and shortfalls as well. The problem though is excuses are a very

harsh mistress. They are like the lotus fruit in Homer's Odyssey. Excuses have a narcotic effect. They sap us of our spirit and our desires. And if we partake in too much excuse making, we eventually lose our sense of what psychologists call an internal locus of control, which is characterized by praising or blaming ourselves for our successes and failures rather than assigning responsibility to factors that are outside of our control. That mode of thought is called an external locus of control. So, for example, an athlete with a strong internal locus of control will credit his success to hard work rather than innate talent. An entrepreneur with an internal locus of control will chalk a failed venture up to his faulty due diligence rather than just bad luck.

And psychologists have been studying locus of control since the 1950s. And what they found is that an internal locus of control is associated with greater academic success, higher levels of self-motivation and social maturity, and a lower incidence of stress and depression and even a longer lifespan. Scientists have observed that people with an internal locus of control tend to make more money, they tend to have more friends, they tend to fare better in marriage, and they also tend to experience more professional success and satisfaction. And on the flip side, people with an external locus of control generally experience more stress and hardship in life. So when you refuse to believe that it's okay to give up and when you refuse to take the easy road out or to look for reasons to

be weak or to blame anyone or anything else for your circumstances, for the situation that you find yourself in, you're able to tap into something primal and something powerful that really does set extraordinary people apart from everybody else. When we can let go of our excuses and really embrace a sense of personal responsibility, there's no telling what we can do. And to illustrate that, imagine for a minute that you are an 11-year-old boy and you have a dream of graduating from high school. Now, the problem here is you're a boy who lives in the backlands of the war-torn country of Uganda, and your entire family has succumbed to disease by the time you were six, and your grandmother simply can't afford the tuition fee of $43 a month for your schooling.

Now, how do you think your odds are looking to you? Not very good, right? Plenty of things to complain about, plenty of excuses that could be made. Well, that was once reality for James Kasaga-Aaron Otway, who refused to see his goal as impossible and refused to resign himself to working the fields filled with everyone that he knew. And instead, what the young James did is he came up with a plan. His plan was to sell a goat to get shoes, clothes, and a bus ticket to visit his aunt who lived near the Ugandan president's country home, and then infiltrate the compound by scaling the barbed wire fence and sneaking past the guards, and finally to get in front of the president and humbly ask him for his help. Well, that's exactly

what James ended up doing and his Mission Impossible stunt worked. And now today he has two master's degrees and he's the CEO and co-founder of an organization called Teach for Uganda, which works to expand educational opportunity to all children in his home country. gimmicks can match the power of word of mouth. So if you are enjoying this episode and you think of someone else who might enjoy it as well, please do tell them about it. It really helps me. And if you are going to post about it on social media, definitely tag me so I can say thank you. You can find me on Instagram at Muscle for Life Fitness, Twitter at MuscleForLife, and Facebook at MuscleForLifeFitness. Let's do another one. So imagine that you've been arrested for writing derogatorily about your government and you have been shipped off to serve an eight-year sentence in forced labor camps

that have an average life expectancy of just one winter. How might you view your fate? Well, Alexander Solzhenitsyn was once a decorated Soviet soldier who fought against Nazi Germany. And in February of 1945, when he was serving in East Prussia, he was arrested by Smirsch for criticizing how Stalin was conducting the war in a private letter that he wrote to a friend. And then a few months later, in July of the same year, he was convicted in absentia of anti-Soviet propaganda and, quote, founding a hostile organization, and he was sent to the gulag. Now, after spending some time in the camps and witnessing the true horrors of communist totalitarianism, Alexander began to reflect on exactly how he had gotten there. Whose fault was

it? Who should he blame? Now, he could have easily blamed Hitler or he could have blamed Stalin, of course, but he came to a very different conclusion. He concluded that it was his fault because ultimately he was playing the same game as his captors. He realized that he had completely forfeited his relationship with the truth and he had not only allowed his society to degenerate into a brutal monocracy, he had also fought to advance his captors' tyranny into the world. And he looked the other way while his compatriots looted and executed civilians, gang-raped women and girls to death, and bombed and strafed refugees. And here's how he later explained it, quote, the cruelty of our executioners. I remember myself in my captain's shoulder boards and the

forward march of my battery through East Prussia enshrouded in fire. And I say, so were we any better? You see Alexander's insistence on shouldering responsibility for the entirety of his condition and his refusal to point the finger elsewhere eventually inspired him to write the book that that passage appears in, which was published in 1973 and was called the Gulag Archipelago. This book chronicled Alexander's years in the slave camps and constituted such a powerful indictment of the very foundations, especially the moral foundations of the USSR, they would eventually contribute to the entire Soviet downfall and win Alexander the Nobel Prize. So think twice before you say, I can't. I can't get in the gym a few days per week, or I don't really want to. I can't save any money, or I don't really want to. I can't save any money or I don't really want to. I can't ditch the junk food for home-cooked meals or I don't really want to. Take a moment and imagine what you might be

able to do if you refuse to make excuses for every failure, for every shortcoming, for every disadvantage. If you refuse to believe that it's okay to give up and that it's okay to just take the easy road out, if you refused to look for reasons to be weak, if you refused to blame anyone or anything else for your troubles. There's a little anecdote in Ashley Vance's biography of Elon Musk that I think applies here. And early on in Elon's career, he once wooed investors into a business of his by sharing that he approaches life and he approaches work and business as a samurai would. He'd rather kill himself than fail. We find a great example of this type of mentality in Alexander the Great, because whether he was sieging the supposedly impregnable city of Tyre or facing the supposedly invincible Persian hordes, he refused to believe that he couldn't succeed.

He said that there is nothing impossible to him who will try and then demonstrated it. It's one thing to say it. It's another thing to actually do it. Thomas Edison is another great example. to actually do it. Thomas Edison is another great example. After going through thousands of unworkable light bulb filaments, he was challenged about his lack of results by a journalist. And his reply was great. He said, results? Why, man, I've gotten lots of results. If I find 10,000 ways something won't work, I haven't failed. I'm not discouraged because every wrong attempt discarded is often a step forward. You

see, people like these, they don't lard their decisions with a thick coat of maybe. They don't saddle them with ifs or buts. They don't look for loopholes and they don't keep justifications or rationales for failing, just waiting in the wings. They don't leap to explain why they haven't or why they don't or why they can't or why they aren't. People like these refuse excuses and they particularly refuse all the excuses that might be made by mediocre people. And that I think is power. I think that is one of the big secrets. That's how to do the unimaginable because when podcast on the internet, then please leave a quick review of it on iTunes or wherever you're listening from. This not only convinces people that they should check the show out, it also increases its search visibility and thus helps more people find their way to me and learn how to build their best bodies

ever too. And of course, if you want to be notified when the next episode goes live, then just subscribe to the podcast and you won't miss out on any of the new goodies. Lastly, if you didn't like something about the show, then definitely shoot me an email at mike at muscleforlife.com and share your thoughts on how you think it could be better. I read everything myself and I'm always looking for constructive feedback, so please do reach out. All right, that's it. Thanks again for listening to this episode and I hope to hear from you soon. And lastly, this episode is brought to you by me. Seriously though, I'm not big on promoting stuff that I don't personally use and believe in. So instead I'm going to just quickly

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