Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Motivation Monday: Stop Waiting for Perfect (or Suffer the Consequences)

Episode Date: January 22, 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/

We need to face reality. Conditions will never be just right for anything that we want to do. Perfect is just an excuse that we use to stay comfortable and to maintain the status quo. 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. Let's start this week with a quote as usual. And this week's quote comes from Ray Dalio, who is the hedge fund mega billionaire and author of the recent mega bestselling book principles, which I highly recommend. And Ray says, quote, I learned that if you work hard and creatively, you can have just about anything you want, but not everything you want. Maturity is the ability to reject good alternatives in order to pursue even better ones. So I want you to think of something right now in

your life that you'd like to improve. Just one thing that you'd like to add or change or remove. Okay, you got something? Good. So now I want you to think of a few ideas of how you might move that needle. So for example, if you'd like to have more money, what are a few ways that you can make some extra cash? Think about that. Get creative. Here, I'll help you. So you could sell your skills on sites like TaskRabbit and Thumbtack. You could use something like Code Academy to learn to code webpages and then offer your services to local businesses. You could rent out a room in your house.

You could teach stuff that you know on sites like Udemy and Skillshare. You could become a quote field agent at fieldagent.net and help businesses do market research. You could make cool stuff if you are a creative person and sell it on a website like Etsy. You could deliver people groceries with something like Instacart or food from restaurants with something like DoorDash. You could sign up on a site like Rover and walk people's dogs. Or maybe you would like to lose some fat and build some muscle instead. So let's brainstorm here. What are some ways that you can do that? And I'll start you off. You could make a proper meal plan. You could learn how to use portion control to your advantage. You could stop buying foods that you tend to overeat. You could do a few weightlifting workouts per week,

a few heavy compound weightlifting workouts per week, or you could do a few high intensity interval cardio workouts per week, or maybe you could just go for some long walks instead. Remember walking burns anywhere from three to 400 calories per hour. If you are walking with a purpose, or maybe those aren't your things, maybe you would like to save more money, or maybe you'd like to read more books or learn new skills. So pause this and make a list of ideas for whatever your ambitions are. Make that list. I'll wait. Hey, quickly, before we carry on, if you are liking my podcast, would you please help spread the word about it? Because no amount of marketing or advertising 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 Muscle for Life, and Facebook at Muscle for Life Fitness. Okay, so my point here is no matter what you'd like to change in your life, it's actually pretty easy to compile a rather lengthy list of feasible ways to do it. The real question then is why are you not doing any of those things? Why haven't you started? What are you waiting for? Are you waiting for the perfect moment? Are you waiting for the perfect mood, the perfect day, the perfect

alignment of the cosmic ducks? Are you waiting for them to get in a row? Well, we need to face reality. Conditions will never be just right for anything that we want to do. Perfect is just an excuse that we use to stay comfortable and to maintain the status quo. Whenever somebody says that they're going to do that one thing one of these days, we all know the truth. We know it when we see it in other people. If they haven't carved out the time and energy already, they probably never will, right? They'll probably just keep dreaming instead of doing, and eventually they won't even be able to bring themselves to dream anymore. Napoleon Bonaparte once said that sometimes death only comes from a lack of energy. Well, a lack of energy often comes from a lack of challenges, from taking on less than

we're truly capable of, which means that waiting for perfect is really a beautiful way to die a little every day. So what's the alternative? Well, the only alternative is to stop telling yourself that you need things to be just right before you can start doing the thing because it will never happen. Start now and figure it out as you go. Many people think that they need to have perfect balance before they start running, but they fail to realize that you really find your balance in the running. So you can sit around and wait for the inspiration to run a marathon, or you can get up right now and you can go for a 15 minute jog. It's a start. You can wait for the stars to automatically align before you start that side hustle, or you can skip Netflix tonight and start reading on where

to begin. Now, if you do this, if you're able to cast aside your feelings, your fears, your doubts, your anxieties, and if you can just get into action instead, you'll begin a process that is far more profound than you probably realize. What you'll find is that the more that you do, the more your attitudes and feelings will shift. The opinions and attitudes and rationalizations that were once dear to you will crumble and fade away. Behaviors that once felt foreign and maybe even formidable will become familiar and comfortable. In short, what will happen is you will gain the upper hand in the war against what Steven Pressfield calls resistance. And you will be on your way to becoming a completely new person, the type of person that is doing the thing, the type of person that you truly want to be. And in fact, that is really the only way to transform yourself.

You see, many people mistakenly believe, or maybe just want to believe, that they first have to change their minds before they can change anything else. And ironically, research shows that this is exactly backwards, that the surest way to change what is going on internally is to change your behavior, and that the reverse actually rarely works. And the reason for this is actually pretty simple. You see, thanks at least in part to the psychological phenomenon of cognitive dissonance, we derive our attitudes mostly from how we behave, not how we think, but how we behave. And we figure out who we are by watching what we do. So when we act in a way that is inconsistent with our current attitudes and beliefs, regardless of why we're acting that way, we will generally adjust the subjective. So we'll generally adjust our attitudes and beliefs to match the objective, to match what we're doing and not the other way around. So in other words, what we do is we adjust our mental models to make sense

of our behaviors, even if they are deceptive, disgraceful, or even downright dreadful. And that means that every little thing that we do every day molds and determines our self-definition. Therefore, if we want to change our self-definition, then we have to change our actions. That's the only reliable way to reinvent and reconfigure ourselves for the better. So we can think all the best thoughts and we can have all the right intentions, but unless we embody them, unless our actions embody them, what will happen is we will simply reinterpret all of our great thinking to conform to the objective reality, which is of course falling short of those original standards. And unfortunately,

the more intelligent we are, the better we're actually going to be at deceiving ourselves and rationalizing everything away. And in many people, this creates a very powerful, self-reinforcing, vicious cycle of degradation and despair. Now, many people say that the biggest obstacles that we face in life are of our own creation, the limitations, restrictions, and criticisms that we impose on ourselves. I don't necessarily disagree. I think that this is probably true, but I think it's also true that the only way that we can clear those hurdles is through our willingness and our ability to take action, not think thoughts, take action, do the things that we know we should do to become the person that we want to be and to have the things that we want to have and to do

those things regardless of how we feel about them, especially at first blush or how we think about them, and then to continue doing them in defiance of the temptations that we have to lose our psychological ground by acting differently. That I think is the biggest obstacle that we face and how we negotiate that is what will ultimately determine our fates. So what are three things that you can start doing or maybe stop doing or modify that you're currently doing every day to start becoming the person that you want to be? Just three things. Let's start simple. Think about it, make a list and then do it for a week and then use that momentum, use that inertia to do them for another week and then another week.

And then once they feel like they are on automatic, come up with three more things that you can start doing, stop doing, change, combination, whatever. Just three, layer them in, do them for a week in addition to the first three that you came up with. Do them for another in, do them for a week in addition to the first three that you came up with. Do them for another week, do them for another week until they feel ingrained and then repeat the process. As silly and simple as that sounds, if you do that consistently for a year, let's say, you might be surprised at how much can change. You might be surprised at how much you can accomplish, how much you can change. You don't need to try to fix everything at once. In fact, that is how you overwhelm yourself and give up. Instead, you want to focus on the things

that if you fix, change, add, remove, or whatever that will make everything else a little bit easier. For example, exercising regularly makes everything else that you want to do in life easier because it gives you physical energy, it gives you confidence, it gives you mental energy, it gives you mental clarity, it even increases cognitive capacities. It really improves every aspect of you and therefore every aspect of your life. Eating well has similar effects. When you get the majority of your calories from relatively unprocessed, highly nutritious foods, you have stabler energy levels, you feel better physically, you feel better mentally, you feel better even emotionally, you have less ups and downs. It's

easier to stay on a more even keel. It's also easier to maintain the type of physique that you want, which again ties back into self-worth, ties back into confidence and into just an overall sense of wellbeing. Spending time educating yourself on things that matter that are going to contribute to the forward motion also makes everything else easier because you have the knowledge itself, which accumulates in compounds, ultimately increasing your skills and abilities and the quality of the work that you're able to do. And therefore, of course, the quality and quantity of the rewards that you can receive for that work and its value is also more universal because

if you spend time educating yourself every day, even if it's on something very specific like coding, for example, if you want to learn that for whatever reason, it could be for commercial, financial reasons, or just as a hobby or whatever, and you'd work on it every day, you're telling yourself that you are the type of person that gets better every day, that cares to get better every day. You are the type of person that gets better every day, that cares to get better every day. You are the type of person that gets a little bit smarter every day, a little bit more informed, a little bit more sharp, a little bit more educated. And that can have profound effects on your self-confidence, on what you think you can achieve. So on how big you're willing to think,

you can achieve. So on how big you're willing to think, what type of goals you set for yourself. And that of course then ties back into motivation, into ambition, into initiative. So anyways, I could go on with more examples of things that are particularly important and meaningful to me, but I think you get the idea. Find the things, the simple things that you can do every day that will slowly but surely help you become the type of person that you want to become. And if you're not quite sure what those things are, read biographies about people that you would like to model yourself after. That's one of the reasons why I personally love reading biographies is I love seeing how very successful, very interesting, very creative, very intelligent people have not only thought, but how they have behaved in their lives, how they went about living. And then you can look for commonalities.

And from there, you can extrapolate, of course, small, simple ways that you can emulate them and hopefully through osmosis channel a bit of the magic they were able to tap into that made them so extraordinary. Hey there, it is Mike again. I hope you enjoyed this episode and found it interesting and helpful. And if you did, and don't mind doing me a favor and want to help me make this the most popular health and fitness 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 muscle for life.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 tell you about something of mine, specifically by flexible dieting cookbook, The Shredded Chef. Now, this book has sold over

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