The world will teach you to crave, but gratification is predicated simplicity & reduction.
“The game of life is a lot like training.
Those who best ignore the nonsense and commit to the mundane for irrationally long periods of time usually have a lot of trouble losing.
A poor strategy for tricking strangers on the internet? Maybe.
Great for real life, though.”
-Ray Zingler on X
I’ve been training pretty consistently (weekly) for 22 years.
It has taught me more about life than any schoolbook or classroom ever could.
I’ve done a lot of great things in training, and I’ve done a lot of dumb things. Training is responsible for some of my life’s greatest memories, while also some of my most devastating.
I remember the feeling of racking that lifetime squat PR and I remember hearing my pec rip off the bone, just the same.
Training is right up there with my parents and mentors when it comes to the biggest catalyst to my personal development.
Most people go to the gym and work out and that’s fine, it’s actually a phenomenal thing to do.
But training for me isn’t about muscles, health, or even wellness.
Training to me isn’t about outcomes. Training to me, is about training.
And the reason is because I have learned through the good and the bad, there is a ton of value in doing simple things, consistently well for long periods of time.
Training, like life, isn’t always going to be the most exciting thing in the world.
In fact, it shouldn’t be.
I have evolved my training philosophy to not only include “boring” but to be centered around boring.
And consequently, I have set my life up to be the same way.
I don’t need to do some “Instagram worthy” work out. I do painfully simple stuff, but the kicker is, I do it every single day.
I don’t need some lavish vacation or some slick ride, in fact I don’t even want them, I want to design a “boring” life that I have no need or desire to vacation away from.
The reason this is important to me is because this frees up bandwidth to gain more access to the most important resource in my life, time.
And the beauty of doing mundane things for irrationally long periods of time is that it makes losing, really, really hard.
The problem is the internet won’t tell you this.
The internet teaches you to crave, while satisfaction and gratification in the real world is predicated on your ability to reduce.
Simplify.
Repeat.
And constantly refine.
