Image courtesy http://www.getentrepreneurial.com
What is easy is rarely worth it, and what is worth it is never easy. I hear people my age complain about how someone else got a lucky break and is undeserving of their success or someone knew the right people or was born into prodigious circumstances and never had to work.
People underestimate the worth of failure. Experiencing failure – when what you take for granted and what you believe to always be there collapses upon itself – is what ultimately crafts our future. It hardens us and steadies us for the challenges that lie ahead.
The most successful athletes and performers never internalize their failure. They blame the refs or the venue – always an environmental factor – and never themselves. I think most of us would presume that they would blame themselves, thinking about how they needed to practice more or hadn’t studied their opponent well enough, but that’s not the case at all. I think many of us would also assume that this deference of blame is unhealthy egotism, but is it?
Not really. When it’s your job to perform at an elite level, where the difference between success and failure is so narrow and you’re expected to perform at that same level every single day, there is no time to question and no time to ponder. Put simply, neither elite level athletes nor the average person gain anything by dwelling on negative outcomes.
Shifting responsibility provides closure and the necessary clarity to focus on what’s important: the next step.
We will always encounter adversity. It’s how we handle that adversity that shapes our character. And what’s worth doing often incurs a great deal of risk that, while manageable, tends to arouse nervousness and anxiety and fear. It’s that anxiety and fear that tells us we are doing the right thing. I know some people who live by the motto “why try at anything that isn’t a guaranteed success?”
Because whatever that thing is will be a hollow substitute for truly living.
So often in life we have this tendency to make appeals to a person’s character or personality when explaining some deviant or undesirable behavior. Bad service at a restaurant? The waiter is lazy. Cut off while driving home from work? The driver is an asshole.
We so rarely take a step back from such situations to consider the broader environment or social context of these occurrences. We feed our psyches a false sense of security so as to make the world more palatable to our tastes. The world isn’t simple, and rarely are people decidedly evil or self-serving.
The theory of the fundamental attribution error, the conceptual bedrock of modern social psychology, argues that people over-estimate the importance of dispositional or personality-based explanations when explaining the behavior of others. We tend to under-value the importance of social or environmental context, the situational or institutional constraints that shape and mold another’s behavior.
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Thinking deep thoughts in Seattle
When teetering between the prospect of decades of poverty or, conversely, servitude as a lifelong student (still not sure what the difference is), I had to make some hard choices before my life got out of hand and I turned forty, still waiting for my career to start.
But before I get to attend networking events and participate in team-building exercises as an M.B.A. student (there we go, now it makes sense), I get the opportunity (again) to flirt shamelessly with standardized testing and middle-school math.
I just dropped over one-hundred dollars on test prep material – that’s not counting the toner and paper costs from printing online study prep materials – and in the process abused twenty acres of endangered South American rain forest I’m sure.
I hope the koalas were safe.
Since this all began about a week ago, it’s been a trifle odd. I’ve found a certain intrinsic pleasure in the repetition offered by standardized multiple-choice exams, resembling, in a way, my coffee addiction. It gives me some sense of satisfaction knowing I’ve developed a palette for rote memorization and a substance that tastes like bitter charcoal.
What surprised me is that while I haven’t studied for an exam like this in years, the methods I used during graduate school to study share the same principles as the methods I’m using right now. I thought readers might be interested in how I go about relearning methods and information.
For your perusal, I present The Definitive Guide to Studying.
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Mmm... words.
I love books. A lot. I wish I could read all of them and still feed myself enough food to stay conscious.
But I can’t, and should I seek to remain coherent and mobile – I do – I often find myself struggling with the need to produce content, and in the same breath give attention to the word-filled tomes occupying valuable desk real estate.
See what I mean?
I have friends and know of others who, after the first page, will finish a text regardless of its quality.
I lack that sort of patience My time is too valuable to waste on poorly researched, poorly argued, or quite simply, poorly written books. You would be surprised how many there are out there.
So when Jamie Hale, uber-fitness coach extraordinaire, sent me his book Knowledge and Nonsense: The Science of Nutrition and Exercise to review for my blog, I knew I was in for quite the ride.
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The catalyst for e-books - Apple iPad (Source: Wired.com)
Apple’s at it again. After much speculation and the usual hype leading up to an Apple product launch, the iPad is finally here.
Unlike the immediate universal acclaim received by its predecessors the iPhone and iPod Touch, Apple’s first foray into the realm of e-readers and tablets has merited quite the ambivalent response.
A number of people have asked me my thoughts on the iPad and what it may portend for the future of tech devices. In this post I weigh in on this curious, over-sized iPod and speculate who may be buying this sleek device that’s been gifted with a rather unfortunate name.
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Six years ago my only sartorial option was a forty-two slash forty-four stretch-pant husky pair of jeans. I was nineteen at the time, and if you couldn’t guess, this blog lead is code for, “I was really fat.” Within six months of my nineteenth birthday I dropped over one-third of my body weight through obsessive cardio and strict adherence to FDA dietary guidelines. Yes, the food pyramid does work if used correctly. I’m not saying it’s going to get you into cover model shape, hardly, but it will allow you to lose weight. So much for all the ado over carbohydrates and insulin blunting fat loss.
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If my gym is any indication, New Year’s resolutions are in full effect. I haven’t seen so many cardio machines occupied on a Sunday evening in quite some time. Actually, in about a year to be more exact about it. Even the weight room was pulsating with epic levels of brotitude. I should have snapped some photos.
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Photography by Emily C. McArthur
After a good dose of scientific inquiry we’re onto the meat of our program, literally. I touched on intermittent fasting in part two and here we’ll see how it fits into a Form Factor Nutrition program. FFN (may as well acronymize it at this point) takes a lesson from fixed-time scheduling and productivity and applies it to the world of nutrition.
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I am, of course, indebted to those who came before me. A big thank you goes out to Alan Aragon, Martin Berkhan, and Lyle McDonald for their help in crafting this article series.
Researching Reduced Meal Frequency
Any nutritional protocol that requires a reduction in meal frequency invokes its own unique set of costs and benefits. Prolonging the time your body stays in the post-fed or fasting state raises the hunger ceiling, so to speak, and would appear to be a damning blow against nutritional methodologies that utilize fasting protocols – who wants to be hungrier more often, right? Well, our bodies and brains being what they are, things aren’t quite that simple. Let’s begin with a discussion of meal frequency and its effect on appetite. Read More
Introduction
Finding the right nutrition plan is like finding the right lover, this article series offering a novel approach to just such an endeavor. It argues that there is no ‘right’ nutrition plan, because looking for the right nutrition plan is a fruitless pursuit, a waste of mental energy. Like love, the right nutrition plan should instead come to you, should fit you, should complement you and your personality and your life. I find it dispiriting that non-athletic populations now require eating agendas, veritable consumption itineraries in Excel as complex as an office work-chart, to see them to an admirable physique. It is to take something instinctive and biological and routinize it, to suck the joy from one of life’s simple luxuries. Form Factor Nutrition is my effort to restore the pleasure inherent in eating, to put the stick and rudder of nutrition in the hands of the people and wrest it from the grips of a distracted diet industry. Read More
