“Don’t you ever feed him?”
It was the kind of question people asked my wife frequently because I was so skinny. Then, when my wife became pregnant with our first child, I outpaced her weight gain two pounds to one.
In all, between our wedding day in June 2001 and the end of 2007, I gained 65 pounds.
By then, I never slept or felt well for a number of reasons, but the weight and my diet were major contributors to both.
Going back a bit, when we moved into our first apartment, my wife really wanted a treadmill. I wasn’t into running at all. I had a physically demanding job, so I got all the exercise I needed at work. We purchased the treadmill and it promptly turned into a convenient coat rack.
In late 2007, when I was at my heaviest, I plugged the treadmill in for perhaps the first time since we moved into our home in 2004.
I think I “ran” two miles that day.
Up went the miles and down came the weight. I’d taken drastic measures to improve my work situation and my dietary habits.
On three separate treadmill runs, I cleared 20 miles. The effort forced me to think about what else in my life I had been avoiding and what other challenges I was too afraid to tackle.
Eve Arnold wrote something recently that resonates around that idea. The substance was:
- Do you want to sit and wonder what might happen in your life if you went all-in, if you tried, you know really tried?
- What will happen if you ignored the noise, forgot other people’s opinions, and just built the thing you wanted to build or did the thing you wanted to do?
The Choice at the Fork in the Road
My friend often paraphrases Elon Musk in this way: “it’s like you’re chewing on glass and staring into the void.”
We’ve all be there in those moments that are bigger than they appear when we’ve got an important, sometimes existential, decision to make. We either commit to “do the thing” or we don’t.
Unconsciously, there must have been a lot of standing and staring at that treadmill before I actually got on, but the decision itself took little more than telling myself I was ready for a change then sticking with it. I finally reached a point where the pain of changing was less than the pain of staying the same.
When I first stepped onto that treadmill, something shifted. The physical result wasn’t immediate. I finished my runs day after day and still felt lousy. . .until I didn’t. Consistently showing up was the only path to go from where I was to where I wanted to be. Most things in life don’t have viable shortcuts. You just have to show up and do the work.
In those early days on the treadmill, it was as much about proving to myself that I could do something hard and uncomfortable as anything else. It’s about tenacity as a character trait.
Robert L. Millet is a multiple award-winning author. He said:
Character is not a product of a [flawless] life, not a result of never making a mistake or an error of judgment, but rather it is never staying down once we have fallen.
What he said has been said by many people in many different ways, but it resonates differently because of his phrasing. Character is most often built because of mistakes and errors in judgment. When we choose to grow from our mistakes, those experiences are often more defining than our successes.
For anyone who has completed more than a few laps around the sun, we all recognize that anything big starts with something small, whether it’s stepping onto a treadmill, sending an email, making a phone call, or making a hard decision. Progress often won’t be dramatic, it just has to be consistent. The fork in the road is always in front of us: procrastinate or start. Failure is inevitable, so the question is whether you’ll stay down or get back up.
For my part, I’ve been sitting around and wondering what might be for a long time. Today, I’m actually taking a step. I’m doing the work, and I’m going to keep showing up. The rest will take care of itself.
How about you?
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