Feeling Lucky? “See How It Goes”

One of these days, I’ll come up with something original, but until then I’ll let the ideas of the beautiful people around me both near and far ping-pong around my skull and share what comes out with you all. That being said, I was struck with a clear verbalization of something I’ve observed for some time now. Seth Godin recently described simply that unpressured pursuits of knowledge, like dieting, doesn’t work well when you just “see how it goes.”

We love that, don’t we? We can’t wait to encourage each other to “listen to your body” and feel things out. Though that, in and of itself, isn’t poor advice, it’s rarely accurate advice. It’s not very accurate because most of our bodies don’t speak honestly with us. Or, said better, we aren’t very in tune with our bodies. Furthermore, we have a natural bias to interpret messages in our own advantage to avoid adversity. Signals like “This is kind of hard..” or “Oh, that doesn’t feel good..” can often be interpreted as a time to stop, when that’s not always true.

That being said, when we enter a pursuit under the pretense to simply “see how it goes” we set ourselves up to fail, especially when the thing that we’re trying has a definitive quality of difficulty (SEE: diet, exercise, any mastery in anything, etc). When see how a new, better diet goes you quit once you realize the other one is preferred more, easier, and more fun. “Seeing how it goes” as a means to learn a new language sounds to me like one’s thing is certain: you won’t be learning a new language. The seeing-how-it-goes strategy with difficult pursuits only works the way the lottery works. If it works you’re lucky, not good.

Fitness is no different. We, at DEUCE Gym, precisely don’t let people prospective students “see how it goes.” They have to commit for at least three months not because it’s better for business, but because it’s better for coaching. Commit. Up the ante. Decide.

 

Logan Gelbrich

@functionalcoach