New Years Resolution? Whats Wrong With This Year?

I've never been one to make a "New Years Resolution."  The turning over of one year to the next new year has held little sway over how I decide to change habits or decide to tackle a new skill, however I can see the appeal from a mindset point of view.  Its a new year, after all and all 365 days of the last year, whether they were full of procrastination or success, are over and the slate, at least mentally, can be clean.  Which is total bullshit.

Hear me out;  there's nothing new about the new year except for a new calendar, one different digit and the last time a new year held sway over the public in any meaningful way was 1999, everyone was partying like Prince and come midnight there was going to be a global computer failure or something (that was a long time ago, so I don't remember all the things that were supposed to happen but fixing it was part of the plot for Office Space, so I can at least thank Y2K for that.)  In reality, the new year means you are still you, your plans, habits and behavior is largely the same from 2014 into the first few minutes of 2015 and beyond.  The calendar doesn't hold such a monumental sway over your dedication that the passage of one year to the next can drastically change the way you think; these things don't happen so suddenly unless you have a Jamestown level of devotion to a moment, which is admirable unless you like poisoned kool aide.

You are the sum of all your mistakes and successes, bad habits and good, the lies you tell yourself and the truths you celebrate and a simple ticking of the clock isn't going to suddenly change that because if it could, you wouldn't wait for a new year to make it happen.  Changing your behavior isn't like changing a diaper, you don't have to wait for a reason, you can do it right now, any time you wish.  The idea of a landmark to wait for change is appealing because it gives us time to continue doing exactly what we want to be doing versus what we think we should be doing instead.  Thats right; if you think you need to change your habit of watching 8 hours of TV a night and instead get in the gym, think about why you watch 8 hours of TV a night.  You do it because its what you want to do.  If you wanted to be in the gym, you would be.  There is nothing so pressing on TV to keep you from that goal, even binge watching an entire season of House of Cards is no excuse, and may actually be the reason Kevin Spacey still has a career (great show, shift fire).

Think about it, when you want to do something, anything, you have all the motivation you need to do it.  From running to the store for a new thingymajig to starting a family, the motivation is reason enough to make it happen.  Oh, the more complex the want the more difficult the path to making it happen but it all starts with honest motivation, which shouldn't be calender dependent.  Is there some ethereal force in December, some chronological specter that will suddenly not be there in January?

Motivation is nice, discipline is better.  We need motivation sometimes to get us to discipline, which is why the idea of a resolution appeals to some people, hell, a lot of people.  In January of 2014 the gym looked like a Roman Ludus; hundreds of extra bodies exploring gym equipment for the first time, getting a feel for the tools used to sculpt themselves into whatever image they had in their mind.  They had all the motivation, nothing could stop them, with resolution in mind they set forth to become something better.  As January fell into February, the motivation was gone and all that was left was those who had found discipline and discipline does not emerge from the cocoon of motivation, it something you have to forge yourself with sweat, time and resolve.  The idea of what you want has to be powerful enough for you to suffer adversity (no matter how difficult) to achieve your goal and the closer you get to that goal, the less the goal matters.  The goal falls away and the lifestyle is all that is left; instead of getting a new version of yourself to fit into your existing patterns and habits, you change the way you think about those patterns and habits, you toss out the patterns and habits that don't fit with what you want.  Its not just a gym thing, its a way of life thing, an approach to all things.  Training to finding a new job to writing a novel or building a bird house.  The more difficult the task we have in mind, the harder it will be for us to find a reason to start it.  We are comfortable in routine, in what we know; the new and what we think of as hard leaves us with all sorts of reasons to not start right now, to wait a while, to set a resolution to begin soon.  We are creatures of habit, after all and those habits allow us to make excuses, to bemoan not having enough time or energy to do something, but the time is there and if it isnt, we can make the time.  We can stop filling an hour or two each day with sedentary entertainment and instead devote that time to our goal; nearly everyone has that time if they are willing to either move some things around or give up part of the time they spend doing other unimportant things.

Training is what we do to become what we want to be with a skill or a physical way of life.  Its an idea that appeals to us enough that we make a plan to achieve it and that plan shouldn't be calender dependent.  Setbacks are coming, excuses for skipping a day or a class or to not even start are coming; be ready for the lack of motivation or the crunch of time when other life activities threaten to steal some of your time.  Every second spent working for a positive goal is better than letting that second go to waste.  Be it 15 minutes or an hour you can give each day, its going to be better than saying some day.   If you want to wait for January 1st to begin, thats fine, but just like January of this year, dont be the guy or girl who has given up before the month was over.  Grind hard, make time and crush all the excuses until that goal isnt as important as your new way of life.

Motivation and Discipline; the difference and how to murder one of them and get away with it.

Motivation and discipline are often confused for the same thing, a general feeling that both words mean either will power or dedication to accomplish a task.  This simply isn't true.   Motivation is like that kid you knew in school; hes got cool shoes and an uncle that will buy him cigarettes; hes got a cool idea that involves a pellet gun and some street lights and man you are so down to go along. When the cops show up, hes the first to bail and leave you holding the bag.

Thats right.  Motivation is an asshole.

Basically, this guy.

The problem with motivation is that its not a constant and often outside of your conscious control.  If you wake up in the morning with a case of fuck everything, everywhere, its unlikely motivation is going to get you into the gym and motivation rarely keeps you from eating the crap you know you shouldn't be eating.  We like motivation though, because motivation is an amazing drug.  Motivation feeds your system dopamine and when that dopamine hits your mesolimbic system, its a natural sort of high that good days and awesome experiences are made of.  We are hard wired to love that feeling to the point that some people become addicted to it.  Dopamine is usually associated with relaxed, or positive energetic experiences.  What we have learned because thanks, neurology  is that dopamine is the body's motivator.  You dont get dopamine because you were motivated to do something, you get dopamine to motivate you to do something.  You get the carrot, or you will most certainly get the stick.

For everyday activities, this may not be a bad arrangement; except for the fact that in order to do something, we generally have to want to do it or we simply wont.  This is America (unless you are reading this from another country, in which case, stand by for a stereotype) we do what we want because freedom, eagles, guns and Teddy Roosevelt.  But what motivates you to be motivated?

Discipline.

I simply cannot rely on Motivation to show up to work on time.  He was cool in high school (except for that pellet gun thing) but now hes a slacker that only has this job because I cant fire him.  Motivation gets all the credit because he still looks good in running shorts and has such a positive attitude about life...when he bothers to show up at all. Discipline is what we rely on to make things happen  to say fuck your feelings, get up and do it.  Its what drags our ass out of bed most mornings, so you are familiar with it in the same way you may understand gravity, or what Pitbull is saying. But Discipline is more than the story about that one time something was hard and you did it anyway.  Every day should have a story like that because that's what life is about, doing the hard shit to live instead of taking the easy route just to exist. Embracing discipline isnt a conscious choice to accept it, because once you have discipline you dont have much choice but to listen to whatever it screams in your ear when Motivation is hiding in the break room drinking vodka out of a coffee mug.

Getting discipline is the hard part because discipline really doesnt have time for your excuses and isnt willing to help you if you haven't accepted hard work into your heart.  Some people will go their whole life without ever feeling the tough love discipline offers and that it pretty sad because discipline is what success is made of.  Some people dont like what discipline has to offer and that's fine, they aren't reading this, you are and either Discipline is nodding over your shoulder or Motivation is telling you to Google some cat videos, we can do this later.

Motivation is sometimes out of our hands; we get talked into a 5K run for charity or the fact that your pants dont fit like they used to motivate you to join the gym.  It may be fleeting, or we reach an arbitrary goal and then slack off again.  When we have discipline, we dont need motivation and our goal becomes long term and much more meaningful..Even your diet looks better with discipline because that ice cream, Whopper or Bacon and mac and Cheese pie becomes a treat, not just Tuesday. 

In case you didnt know, this does exist.

So how do you get discipline on your side?  You start small because if you dont have it right now, you cant handle it all at once.  Start small but push hard.  Giving 100% for 15 minutes is much better than finding the most comfortable machine in the gym to facebook on of an hour.  Trim your diet up by weeding out what you want to eat and taking in what you need to eat.  Talk with people who are familiar with disciple and see if how they got to where they are is going to work for you.  Be ready for set backs, be ready to not want to do it but do it anyway because its not about today, its about every day.  Make fast food a reward, not a normal event.  Celebrate your victories because they are what keeps Discipline happy.

When you get to the point that you are putting in an hour at the gym 5, maybe 6 days a week without much thought to the time you could be spending on the couch, you have found discipline and when you decide to give yourself a treat and pick up a Super Baja Taco or milkshake on the way home, Motivations deadbeat ass will just be waking up, thinking about doing something tomorrow.

Early Success is a Terrible Teacher

A well-oiled machine, as the saying goes is a good thing.  Over-oiling the machine is not.  From fitness to shooting, there has to be a balance between our practice and our rest.  For most of us, the concept of boredom takes care of any potential issues we would otherwise have by over working something at the mental level and for the physical, we have burnout, which usually occurs during lactic acid production.  When lactic acid is produced, it splits into a lactate ion and a hydrogen ion.  The hydrogen ion is the acid and it gets involved in your muscles by interfering with electrical signals, slowing energy reactions and impairs muscle contractions.  The burn is that hydrogen ion.  Paying attention to the burn is important.  Fight through it and you could cramp or injure yourself.  Despite the body’s attempt to make us stop, quite a few of us are stubborn to the point of pushing things too far and this leads to injuries that could have very easily been prevented by just admitting that there is always another day.  We won’t see gains every time we step in the gym; it’s just not going to happen.  Sure, we could break things down to weight increments in the gram/ounce level or speeds into the hundredths of the second and see some improvement each and every time but I don’t know too many people who do that (or where you can buy some 1 ounce plates.)  No, as much as we hyped ourselves up all week to deadlift another 10 pounds or finally step up to that 45 Lbs kettle bell, today may not be that day and that’s okay.  It needs to be okay because like it or not, our body is telling us something and we should listen.  Next week, next leg day, next WOD, next attempt we have another chance.  We can prepare for that next chance.  Sometimes the preparation is needed; knowing how to prepare is always needed.

“Early success is a terrible teacher. You're essentially being rewarded for a lack of preparation, so when you find yourself in a situation where you must prepare, you can't do it. You don't know how.”

― Chris Hadfield, An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth

Here’s something interesting.  In shooting, it’s really no different.  

Of course I know that lactic acid isn’t as much of (or any) issue, we don’t generally exert ourselves in isolated skills practice to the point of muscle fatigue; but the mental fatigue and strain on our senses is very real and can prevent us from achieving a goal we set for ourselves and this is a good thing.  When I step on the range with an unrealistic expectation and I succeed, I am setting myself up for a future failure.  It may have been nothing but chance that allowed me to perform to a level I may have had no business performing at and that false confidence is more harm than help.  All the fundamentals combined and executed properly should give me the result I want; at least in the static sense.  Shooting a bullseye from a standing and relaxed position under no stress from 10 feet is objectively easier than doing the same from a supine position with a time requirement.  The fundamentals must be obeyed for success, but they have to be adapted as experience is gained.  We are the sum of all our mistakes and those mistakes have to be made in order to be the best prepared.

 

What’s more, the fatigue we experience from repetition keeps us from making needless mistakes and helps to prevent false confidence in early success.  It takes time and proper practice to build motor skills and make them work in concert with our senses.  In Motor Learning, Dr. Schmidt established that it takes approximately 300-500 repetitions to establish a new motor skill, 3000-5000 to correct a bad motor skill.  Now there are a lot of caveats and conditions that can alter either number because learning does not occur in a vacuum but of the two numbers, which one is preferable?  300-500 is a much shorter distance to travel.  If I fatigue, get sloppy or try to get ahead of myself, I’m likely to slide much further back when I hit a performance wall and need to put in much more time to fix past mistakes.  I can be the fastest and most accurate shooter in the world at 5 feet; that doesn’t mean that performance carries back to 10 feet or 50 feet.  I can have perfect deadlift form pulling 145 lbs, that doesn’t mean I can jump right to 300lbs even if I am physically strong enough to do it.  Everything has to be fine-tuned over time and setbacks are going to occur.  We are going to hit performance walls we don’t think we can get over.  We may have to dwell at a certain skill level for days, weeks or months before our foundation is strong enough to support getting over that wall but once we do, sliding backwards is unlikely.

The foundation of skill is built on proper repetition; shortcuts to genuine skill don’t exist.  True strength, true skill is the ability to perform any required task under any conditions.  We get there one day at a time.

Status Quo Bias: How We Fool Ourselves

Status Quo Bias

I have to admit, the first time I heard that term I had a vague idea of what it was; maybe in the same way that I have a vague idea of how the transmission in a car works.   I understand the ideas behind the gears and how they are changed, but I can in no way appreciate the engineering math that makes them function.

Status Quo Bias affects us all to one degree or another, but it is by far the most powerful (and detrimental) when it distorts and hinders our abilities to improve our skills.  So what is it?  Simply put, it’s the preference to have things remain the way they are.  Doesn’t sound so bad, right?  Well the bias has some small implications on our personal skills and conditions and by small I mean life altering. 

Lets be honest, its usually much easier to do what we are doing than to do anything harder.  There are a great deal of hard things in life and plenty of people exert a great deal of effort avoiding those things to the point that they become experts in sedentary excellence.  I’ve known people in my life so lazy that if sitting on a couch was a career field, they would be Doctoral experts on optimal ass placement vs range of motion to chip bag.  Its just so easy to meet the minimum standards for existence that anything harder is scary and because its scary, we perceive attempting it as a loss.  That’s right, sometimes doing something new that has positive implications is viewed as bad by our brain because of the work that must be done.

Now, Status Quo Bias ranges from; the book was way better than the movie to I can’t break an 8 minute mile run time.  Of the two, only one has potentially life altering consequences (or both I guess if you are still as pissed about the hobo piss fueled eye-cancer that is The Hobbit).  Status Quo Bias isn’t always a bad thing; it’s what keeps what we like what we like and is probably the only reason some musicians still have careers despite bizarre and offensive behavior *cough Bieber.*  We find our favorite shows, foods, drinks, clothes and Magpul magazine style and our bias makes sure we stick with it.

But when it comes to training, Status Quo Bias is cancer.  Be it poor physical condition or the idea that you cant do [insert skill/technique here] better, Status Quo Bias is basically giving you the idea that you are perfectly fine meeting the minimum standards in a gun fight.

Ill let that sink in.

I’ve written on this topic in the past and more recently as well, though I felt that drawing attention to Status Quo Bias might be helpful for a few reasons; let’s look at how it works.  Chances are if you don’t know if you can run a hundred yards or not without a break, the answer is no.  What keeps you from getting an answer to that question is you may feel like there should be more to gain from running a hundred yards than the physical act of the accomplishment.  Essentially saying that the gain you do get (calories burned, exercise, personal knowledge etc.) is not worth what you must give to achieve it (this is called the Endowment Effect).  Compounded on top of that, we as humans have a strange psychological quirk in which losing at something can be twice as bad as winning (Loss Aversion) and because of that, we often see any potential gain a risk compared to what we lose.  What could you possibly lose in running 100 yards that outweighs the gain?  Besides your shot at a Doctorate in Couch Cushion Comfortability, you may lose the ability to remain in the state you are in.  The comfortable, easy, minimum standard state.  Remember what I said about gunfights and minimum standards?

If your default condition is out-of-shape or hits-the-target-occasionally, chances are you are who I’m speaking to.  The thing is, whatever you have been doing up until this point has been giving you those same results and its obvious that you wont improve without change.  As they say, if you do what you have always done, you will get what you have always gotten.  Results require change, progress and the sort of self-honestly that makes you better than you were yesterday, and willing to fight for who you will be tomorrow.  This doesn’t happen overnight.  It takes hard work, which is the moral enemy of Status Quo Bias.

Learning from others

When it comes to shooting and fitness, change is a requirement to continued improvement.  For shooting, you don’t know what you don’t know and this is where professional instruction comes in.  Learning the proper methods for techniques and skills can be done (to a degree) from the internet and videos, though the largest road block is that there is no one right there with you to let you know if you have it right, or are being the most efficient.  Fitness is no different; if you are already on the path, plateaus and performance walls are best destroyed with the help of new routine and a more experienced coach/trainer/guy who does pushups better than you.  Sometimes the best way to improve is having someone there to tell us exactly how we suck, and show us ways to suck less (hopefully in a nicer way, unless you respond best to tough love).

Gear fixes

Pretty easy; guys buy gear because it’s needed or because they want it.  The reasons for wanting it should not include hopes for skill improvement simply based on owning it.  I can spring for a Formula One car, that doesn’t mean I will be able to drive any more efficiently.  I can go up in caliber, that doesn’t compensate for all the rounds that don’t hit the target.  I can buy P90X, that doesn’t mean I will lose weight.  I have to learn how to properly use and handle the gear, and all the basics to doing so are not gear inherent.

Culture shock

You try something for the first time, and that shit is hard.  Working support-hand only drills, running a mile, doing a pull up, dialing in data on a scope.  Its hard enough that you don’t want to do it again.  This is the tipping point you have to find motivation to get past.  Let’s be honest, if we don’t sweat doing it, there’s a higher chance we will stick with it than if it makes our head pound, limbs shake and stomach threaten to evacuate from all directions.  I hate to be cliché but if it was easy, everyone would do it.  What separates you from the sheep, the victim and the idiot is that you are willing to take responsibility for your own life.  Part of that is a dedication to improvement that doesn’t end when things get a little tough.   Status Quo Bias wants you to remain just as you are; in some cases that’s perfectly fine.  When it comes to fitness and shooting ability, you need to improve and you have to want it more than you want to remain where you are.   You have to force yourself, and force others to help you force yourself if need be, to improve.  Now’s a good time.

-Aaron Cowan