1/30/22
I’ve been sitting around, procrastinating writing this, for at least two hours. Browsing YouTube, and this video is what motivated me to sit down and write. If you didn’t know, Mac Miller is my favorite artist. I got one of my more prominent tattoos because of one of his songs, and watching this helped me snap out of whatever fog I had been in this morning. I started my last semester of college this week, and also worked somewhere around 50 hours. It was a pretty hard week, and honestly I lost a grip on a lot of my coping mechanisms. My budget has not been updated, I just updated it for the first time since Monday. I only journaled four times this week, and was barely meditating. Which is so counterintuitive, these are the things that will help me out the most, and yet I’m not doing them. I walked a lot, that was helpful, but it almost felt like I was hibernating. My girlfriend and I got into these big arguments Thursday, Friday, AND Saturday. Which is unlike us, but we’re both just incredibly stressed and I think it’s hard to remember to fight the problem instead of each other. My classes are much harder than I expected, I’ve always sorta breezed through school but I don’t think that will be the case this semester. This leads me to my thought of the week, the idea of effort.
Effort is such a strange concept. Life doesn’t grade on effort, your worth is not summarized by how much you try. Rather it’s where that effort is placed. The median American net worth is $121,700. Jeff Bezos’ net worth is $170.4 billion. So does Jeff Bezos work 1.4 million times harder than the average American? Probably not. This isn’t at all a comment on capitalism or whatever, but rather a comment on how effort should not be the only recorded metric. Trying is simply not enough, you have to try in the right way, and with the right prerequisites. I see it often in the fitness world, especially with younger athletes. They come in, and they try incredibly hard, they’ll deadlift every day or train seven days a week. From the outside looking in, they’re doing the right thing, showing up and doing the work. But not many of these athletes play in college, even less go pro. So there’s clearly some sort of disconnect in how we approach effort. I think about it in terms of raw effort, and intuitive effort. Raw effort is often ineffective, intuitive effort on the other hand, takes into account the most effective place to give effort.
If I were to grade myself this past week, raw effort I would have an easy A. But with intuitive effort, I would get a F. I skipped the things that would make my effort effective. I could have had the same exact week, schedule and all, but if I had done the right steps to prepare for the hunt the week could have been a breeze.
Intuitive effort takes into account preparation and recovery from the hunt, raw effort tricks you into thinking you are constantly hunting. But even cheetahs need to rest check out this excerpt:
“Cheetahs must cool down after they hunt if they expend too much energy running. Getting to such high speeds puts a tremendous toll on their bodies with their body temperature rising to dangerous heights. You'll often see them lounging in the shade after sprinting or running.”
If we don’t build in time to recover from the hunt, nature will do it for us.
Happy Sunday.