Thought for the day 04 November 2007.
So ladies and gentlemen. Here we are commemorating Chillen's 100 pages of incredible advice. It must be said that this guy has a HUGE amount of patience and motivation to keep up what he is doing. I think we should all thank him for it.
And onto my thought for the day...
This year at school I have GCSEs. They are not the most important exams, nor the most difficult, in fact, they are the first real formal exams I am actually taking. But already, a lot of my year group are already saying 'I just can't be arsed anymore. I want to have fun.'
Then it's the same story for sports and working out etc. "I don't really care. I like my food."
These comments are coming from 15/16 year olds, mostly fairly well off, and at one of the top 50 schools in the country. Pretty alarming don't you think?
However it asks the question, why do some people strive to exceed normal expectations while other's sit around, watching tv, staying in mediocre shape and enjoying their food? Then they go out, drink alcohol, relax, etc etc. Repeat process.
The truth is, I don't think people really want to be doing that. I think everybody wants to suceed but most stop short when they run into a small spot of failure. Some quotes I have support this to an extent, however I have not written down the sources (damn). Shame.
"The man who can drive himself further once the effort gets painful is the man who will win"
"A failure establishes only this, that our determination to succeed was not strong enough."
Both quotes speak truth. For example, your average Joe will not want to work through pain. Basic human instinct stops when things get tough, it's a way of saying to ones self "this isn't good. Stop"
In the long run even if it is beneficial, for some reason basic logic reasons that we should be having fun and happiness all the time. Now I'm not going to go off on a rant as to why this is the case. Probably because a humans s.e.x drive is better when they are happy or something. But meh.
So what takes a person through this barrier of telling yourself you can't succeed? I believe this to be a few things:
1) the feeling of success prior to going through the struggle - If you have had previous success you know the feeling of it, and you crave it again.
2 success becoming a habit "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit" - that quote sums it up.
So if we take a guy who has been 200lbs of fat, 5ft 2 and has extrememly low confidence for example. This person sees that he must do something about his weight. So he starts dieting. Then one day at 180lbs, some lady says "wow, you look really good," an immediate confidence boost will occur, and this guy will keep going. Providing he has no -tive feedback, he would probably have en ough motivation to keep improving, a snowball effect as it were.
So then for the sake of debate, if we took a 6ft 180lb, well built, lean man, with everything going for him including a stable relationship with a hot wife, kids, 2 houses, the works, who one day wakes up and thinks "what's the point in training, who have I got left to impress?" Overtime say he loses 10 lbs of muscle and it is replaced by fat, and the guy he plays golf with on a sunday notices, and his mates start digging in, slowly he will most likely get paranoid, and if he does not have the mental toughness to get back to where he was, a 'fall from grace' effect would occur. Thus causing a negative snowball effect.
Before somebody can be motivated to a level in which they will keep going, no matter how little or much they have, they need to be rock solid. They need to be able to laugh off anything anybody says to them, and they need to be able to bounce back whenever they can. Just think to yourself "I am the best. I will not let myself underachieve, and whenever some muppet starts slagging you off, or expressing their opinion, just remember, for every person who wants to do that, there will be two that will back you up. Unless your Britney Spears.
Thank you all.
