Life is Simple. Simple Isn’t Easy.

I spent years lacking the discipline to go to the gym, make food at home, and take care of my general health. 

Through this approach to living my life while maintaining old habits from when I was younger and an athlete, my body was able to store a decent amount of excess nutrients. 

That’s right. I got fat. 

At least, heavier than I would like with pecs that were significantly more rounded than I would care to admit. 

I finally got fed up this past year and made a commitment to myself that I would spend the next year focusing on building the discipline that I had been lacking. 

Through the pursuit of that discipline, I lost 35 lbs, read… a lot (okay, I used audible, YouTube, Snipd, and Spotify to consume a lot of content), and stumbled upon an obvious but revolutionary lesson. 

The lesson is how anything worth doing in life is simple and that just because it is simple, and at times obvious, it doesn’t make it easy. 

For example, to lose weight we all recognize that diet is going to play a fundamental role. I am well aware of the importance of a caloric deficit, increasing activity levels to maintain muscle mass, and how eating Dominos pizza every night is likely not conducive to achieving a shredded bod. 

I saw minimal progress on my own but tremendous progress when I hired a dietitian. Doing all of what I already knew to do. 

If you want to achieve any modicum of success, you know that it is going to take time and effort. The only way to achieve payoff is through persistence and shortcuts are more likely to hurt you than help you, even if they work eventually. 

But this takes time. So, naturally, we gravitate towards YouTube to seek out shortcuts by clicking on the title that is just click-baity enough that it will probably deliver on some semblance of its promise by giving us insights into what they have done. 

But most of the lessons they share are unoriginal and if you actually try what they share, you end up discovering that they have likely spent significantly more time learning their craft than you have. 

Time to repeat the cycle of looking for shortcuts as our impatience gets the best of us! 

Our attention spans are so short and we are growing more and more accustomed to instant gratification that while we see the obvious and know what we must do, we don’t have the patience to put in the effort to achieve our desired outcomes. 

Everything we want in life is simple. But our emotions cloud our judgement. The desire to have the outcome we are seeking immediately supersedes our knowledge that good things take time. 

So we spin our wheels instead of focusing on just doing the simple thing day in and day out to actually get what we want out of life. 

I tried to sprint through this year thinking I could build discipline in one year and move on to the next chapter of my life. 

Reality dictates that discipline is a lifelong practice that I doubt I will ever master. It isn’t a sprint that I can force to become a part of me but a dance in which I will sometimes lose my rhythm and need to regain it. 

At times, it will feel like I am out of sync for an eternity but in hindsight, nothing ever lasted as long as it felt in the moment.