The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Is patience the ultimate virtue to try and cultivate? I've been listening to a lot of the endurance guru Gordo Byrn while doing trainer rides lately. His big shtick is the 1000-day, or roughly three year, plan that encourages you to focus on longer time horizons for improvement. The focus of this mainly seems to be with building fitness for endurance sports, but can be applied to a lot of other things like finance, education, and personal relationships (indeed Gordo seems to take this approach with his family too, with seemingly pretty good results). This has got me thinking about my own life and how a more patient longer term view could have served me much better in many areas of my life. I can think of three big examples off of the top of my head.
First with endurance sports. I ran 14:41 for 3 miles at the Illinois state cross country meet my senior year of high-school, which was roughly ten years ago. I got marginally faster in college, up to about that speed for 5k, but haven't gotten any better, and have in fact probably regressed quite a bit since then (can maaaaaybe run a 16:00 5k right now). Part of this is just aging and reprioritizing things in my life, but there's a very real sense in which large periods of injury/illness/burnout has derailed my training because I was too aggressive and impatient and had to completely shut it down because I put myself in a huge hole. Of course it's far from too late, I'm only 27 and have at least another good 8-15 years to continue to improve with a less-aggressive, more balanced and kinder training plan focused on maximizing recovery.
Secondly with my scientific career, my publication record would be much improved and my doctorate would be complete if I had been more patient. I put a lot of pressure on myself to get results NOW, leading to overly complicated failed experiments that didn't produce any data that I could use in my thesis. If I had focused on this long term view (producing things that are real and useful and gradually building that number up over time), instead of trying to impress my bosses at our weekly meetings, I might have enough material to graduate. This is still something I need to work on, and is perhaps not helped by the weekly meeting structure in my lab. Also want to note that my publication record isn't particularly bad: I have one first author paper and multiple 2-3 author papers, and will have two more by the end of my PhD, I just think I could have accomplished this all faster and with less stress if I was more patient and systematic.
Finally, with romantic relationships, as many of you on this forum have probably observed, have suffered greatly from a lack of patience. In high school and college it was an impatience to be "in a relationship" which led me to be with people who were much more interested in me than I was in them. This is still part of the problem, but now there is an additional layer of impatience about wanting to get married and have children, which exacerbates the former problem. I'm both desperate for a partner and unwilling to actual discriminate between those who come my way because I'm impatient to get married and have children.
Contrast this to things in which I feel like I have applied patience. The foremost thing that comes to mind in my life is learning Spanish, which I've been doing consistently for the past 5 years. This past year I passed the DELE and consider myself functionally fluent, although there is still a ways to go in terms of what I would like to accomplish. This success came from the consistent 1-2 hour a day practice in the language. Another example is my blog, where I've slowly built up a following into the low hundreds, just by consistently publishing an article or two a month.
Anyway, thanks for coming to my TED talk. What has your experience with patience been? Are there error states I should watch out for (i.e. being too patient?).
I'm tired so this post will not be eloquent, but IME it's not just patience but a combination of mental attitudes. Patience is important but it's not everything.
"Commit to Sucking." Life is marathon, not a race. You aren't good at $THING today. You will not be good at $THING today. Or tomorrow. Or next week or month. For some things, like instruments, probably not even next year. Commit to capital-S Sucking at $THING. Realize you will Suck for a while, and just make peace with that. Your run times will be shit. Your violin playing will be shit. Your dance moves will be shit. Get used to Sucking because right now, You Suck. But that's okay because there's good news -- by Sucking every day, you will eventually begin to Suck Less. The only way to fail is to stop trying. If you stop trying you will Suck Forever, a fate worse than death. Few people hate the fat guy in the gym doing his damnedest to bench 1plate. Everyone hates the fat guy on the couch who thinks he's too good to Suck and so makes excuses or does some newfangled get-fit-quick fad diet or workout routine instead of putting in the hard work and humbly submitting to the Suck.
Figure out how to enjoy the process. I hate running, so I listen to audiobooks, buy cool running gear, and run many different routes to not get bored. I hate lifting after a long break from the gym so for the first two weeks I let myself have snacks or little cheat meals after a good workout. I didn't like sucking at my musical instruments, so I learned some fun little songs to mess around with and played them for my kids in between boring exercises. Do whatever you have to do cajole your stupid animal brain into doing $THING instead of scrolling Twitter.
Consistency is key/You're stronger than you think. "Consistency is key" when you are practicing $THING and you're ready to go hard. I usually squat 110kg but today I'm ragin' and I feel like I can squat 130kg CMON LETS GO BABY!! I'm fucking on fire today shredding out this song, I've practiced for an hour but I'm gonna keep going for another hour!! No. Stop. It's a marathon, not a race. Pace yourself. Save that energy for tomorrow's session. On the other hand, "you're stronger than you think" when you're tired. I'm in a bad mood, I don't want to practice my scales or latest song. I only got 4 hours of sleep, there's no way I can go lift today. It's raining outside, I might get a cold. Etc etc etc. You're stronger than you think, just grit your teeth and do it. You can give the Voice of Weakness in your head permission to mentally bitch and moan and whine throughout the whole thing. Just listen to it and nod sympathetically as you go ahead and do $THING anyway while it whines and complains. Just get your daily session in. It's not going to kill you, just do it.
This all sounds like trite self-help nonsense but it legit works for me. I was not consistent or conscientious until my late 20s when I internalized these things. I used to injure myself frequently at the gym and had a billion started-and-abandoned hobbies. Now I focus on a few things and try to take a long view, and I've made good progress over the last few years. Now excuse me I need to get off the couch and go for a run.
I feel like this is some real guidance counselor morality for the motte.
Most people will laugh at people who suck in the gym. It's normal, it's natural. Hierarchy is the basic element of human activity, and that extends to exercise. They might know it's wrong, and might be polite, but pretending people aren't looking down on you when you suck is ridiculous.
Most people will probably be indifferent towards most strangers they see at the gym, unless they're hogging the weights they were planning to use or otherwise causing issues.
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