I am a Purdue basketball fan.  That means I have watched the Purdue snatch defeat from the jaws of victory more times than seems reasonable.  The story feels the same, even if it is different each time.  My beloved Purdue Boilermakers get a big lead in a basketball game, and then at the end of the game blow the lead.  Everything seems to be going well for the team, and then in an instant it seems that it is not.  Being an inquisitive guy, I of course look for a pattern.  The pattern to me seems to be that the basketball team quits doing the things that got them the huge lead in the first place, and then they quit scoring points.

When you look at it that way, it makes it sound as though basketball teams and coaches are morons.  Purdue is not the only team I have seen suffer from this phenomena.  I have seen high school teams, college team, and NBA teams all do the same thing.  The game is going great for them, and then they start doing something different.  They change pace, offenses, quit letting the right players shoot and a host of other changes.  Then things get bad fast, like a tidal wave the opposite team charges back.  I have watched this happen a lot.  I always end up asking why didn’t the team just keep doing what was working for them?

I have no definitive reasons why sports teams quit doing things that made them successful.  Coaches like to look smart, so sometimes they just outsmart themselves.  People at times also just like to make changes, for no apparent reason.  Whatever the underlying cause of this behavior, changing things that are working is often a trap.

It’s a trap on the basketball court and it’s a trap everywhere else in life.  This past year I have wrote almost 80 posts expressing my gratitude for the abundance and wonderful things in my life.  These writings have helped me focus on the wonderful things in my life and not the negative things.  Writing these posts is easy, and it has proven to have all sorts of benefits to me.  I’m in a much more peaceful place internally when I write these things.  My brain keeps telling me to stop though and do something different.  I think this is my brain just trying to trap me.  In my life it has been hard to find things that really work well, and here I am talking to myself about stopping something that is working.  This might make me an idiot or just human, but the trap remains.

I do my best to avoid this kind of trap.  I have kept writing some of these writings.  I would rather not ever go away from this practice completely.  The frequency of these writings can scale up or down depending on my life at the moment, but I see no reason to get rid of things that are working.  This is just a case of avoiding the whole grass is greener phenomena.

Life is full of traps and tricks we play on ourselves, and this kind of thinking is just one more of them.  Knowing the trap is the first step in defeating it.  I watch for this kind of thinking because I am finding more and more you should ride things out that are working well.  There will be other chances in life to try other things.  Otherwise I feel like I’m just succumbing to some sort of Lifestyle ADD.  Now if I could only get my beloved Purdue Basketball team to do the same thing…

Every week I spend a lot of time reading and looking for new ways to get stronger, healthier and more awesome.  Here are some of the best things I have found this week.

Strength And Conditioning

An article on using flexing and posing to increase components of fitness.  I like the concept of using this because it is lower risk and can be done anywhere without equipment.  https://www.t-nation.com/training/flex-your-way-to-a-harder-body

This was a good interview with Stefi Cohen, world record powerlifter and doctor of physical therapy.  It covered a lot of interesting topics.  https://tim.blog/2021/01/06/stefi-cohen/

Life

A great article on dealing with pain.  A mindset that can translate to all sorts of pain.  https://www.elitefts.com/education/be-willing-to-feel-pain/

An interesting article I read about profanity being performative.  Makes me wonder what else I am doing that is mostly performative in nature. https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/sunday-firesides-profanity-is-performative/