Insidious Foolishness

“As dead flies cause even a bottle of perfume to stink, so a little foolishness spoils great wisdom and honor.” – Ecclesiastes 10:1, New Living Translation

I was reading my Bible and this verse hit me like a ton of bricks.  Great wisdom is ruined by a little foolishness…  This is bad for me.  My wisdom is not all that great, and my foolishness exceeds the limits of the word “little.”   How many times in life have I let just a little foolishness ruin something that was going well?

In my arrogance I have made the error of thinking my efforts and status are far more resilient than they are.  Like so many people I have worked hard at things in my life.  I have done the right things and acted wise and honorable in these pursuits.  Following this virtuous path, I have had many nice things in my life.  So many times I have then allowed foolishness to enter the equation.

My foolishness takes many forms.  My foolishness can be obvious.  This is a kind of foolishness that is easy to avoid, but one that I will still indulge in.  It can also be sneaky and creep in like some sort of metaphysical ninja.  The most insidious forms are when I trick myself into foolishness.

Foolishness can be very insidious when we don’t even consciously choose to be stupid.  We can misjudge a margin of error.  When we do this think we are doing ok and just choose not to stay strong.  Then we realize the margin of error was smaller and we shot ourselves in the foot.  We did nothing consciously wrong, but doing this kind of thing over and over again is foolish.  I remember engaging in this sort of miscalculation many times with school projects.  I would simply not do the extra credit options because I was already getting a good grade.  Later I would find out I had just missed the grade I wanted to get.  I misjudged the margin of error I had.  Often this extra credit would not have been much more work, not doing it was just foolish.  I repeated this mistake many times over my school years.  This fits the description of tricking myself.

I can also be good at tricking myself into being lazy.  I think letting my guard down is a form of being lazy.  Letting our guard down is definitely a form of foolishness.  It can be so easy to do.  We can get in a hurry or complacent and all of a sudden we have a problem.  There are so many ways foolishness can be insidious.

Foolishness is always there waiting to cause trouble.  My life has proven many times over that just a little can derail things fast.  I feel this means I must do several things to succeed. 

I must remember that one drop of poison will poison the well.

I must remember that foolishness is not some sort of blatant evil.  It’s still very destructive.

I must remember to stay constantly vigilant because otherwise I am being foolish.

The Useful Strong Stuff Journal Vol. 25. The Thing I Know Most About

A week ago I took an exam.  This exam was to become certified as a personal trainer.  I passed and can now say I am a personal trainer.  I did this for a long list of reasons.  One of the biggest reason is that because when it comes to lifting weights… “I know about these things.”

For over 20 years I have been obsessed with exercise and all sorts of gym stuff.  In my free time I read about working out, and watch Youtube videos about it.  I also have only once since around the age of 13, taken any time away from the gym other than for injury reasons.  Between my general nerdiness about lifting, and my practical experience, I know a thing or two.

Despite knowing a thing or two about lifting, I really never put it to any good use.  Through struggles with unemployment and career woes, I couldn’t use this knowledge and experience base I had.  The thing I knew the most about was sitting there but I couldn’t use it.

Without a certification, it would be hard to get insurance, a job, or have any credibility to use this workout knowledge I had.  However if you asked me what in this world did I know more about than anything else, it would be lifting weights. 

This summer I did something about that though.  I spent the whole summer studying to become a certified trainer.  Now I can get liability insurance, now I can entice clients, now I can do all the things it takes to be a trainer.  This really isn’t that big of a deal.  A lot of people do this.  What the big deal to me is, I took my biggest career asset off the shelf and got to a place where I could use it. 

I don’t know where this training thing will take me.  I may not help any clients, I may not get any jobs.  I have mobilized my greatest base of experience though.  Instead of sitting on a potential goldmine I am now mining.  Too often we sit on good things and don’t mobilize them.

I sat on this fitness knowledge for years.  I have now though fully mobilized this knowledge.  I wasted time but am not wasting it anymore.  I think we should all ask ourselves what goldmines we’re sitting on.  What resources are we not mobilizing?  Are we even using our BIGGEST asset?  For me the answer was no. but not anymore.

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

Pullup tips and ideas for larger folks.  Not everyone is 5’6” and 145 pounds, this article is for people that got some mass and height.  https://www.t-nation.com/training/pull-ups-for-big-guys

A good article with some mobility exercises that are easy for people who don’t like doing mobility stuff.  https://www.t-nation.com/training/best-mobility-exercises-for-lifters/

Some good ideas around the concept of “bad exercises” and which ones might be bad, and when.  https://www.nfpt.com/blog/are-there-bad-exercises

Mental Fitness

I listened to this podcast about peak performance while on a good long walk.  It had a lot of interesting ideas for setting up flow in it.  https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/podcast-672-how-to-do-the-impossible-this-year/

The Useful Strong Stuff Journal Vol. 24

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/

High School Weight Room Antics

A dumb sophomore loaded up the bar to test his max squat without warming up, he wanted to just see how the weight felt.  Soon he was pinned under the weight.  The old dude that was in the gym with him came over and lifted it off his back.  The old dude scolded the protagonist of our story.  He told him he needed to learn how to warm up and how to do the exercises correctly.  The old Yoda-like dude then offered to show our young protagonist how to do these things, how to lift correctly.  In a moment or rare humility the sophomore accepted.  Soon he was learning much from his mentor about the weight room and the iron.  I was that dumb sophomore, and I am grateful for all my friend Shane has taught me in the gym.

I was being a gym idiot that day and needed to be rescued from my own stupidity.  Luckily Shane was a cool enough dude to help me out.  I know this early intervention helped me learn a lot of things about lifting that helped me stay safer in the gym.  His lessons also helped me make a little faster progress.  Shane was in his 30s and had no real incentive to help other than being a good guy.  I think that was another lesson that every 16 year old needs to get too.  At that age you can never have too many lessons in being a good guy and how to act properly.

This whole incident was a whole lesson in gym culture as well.  At least it is the kind of lesson in how gym culture should be.  In the gym we should all help each other out.  There can be a brotherhood of iron and a lot of us meatheads love and crave this brotherhood.  Every gym has its lone wolfs that don’t want anything to do with anyone, but that’s not what a gym should be.  The culture that makes everyone better is one of helping, teaching, and training each other.  This makes our journey in the gym more productive and more enjoyable as well.  I got this early lesson from Shane in addition to the lessons on lifting.  It has stuck with me and informed much of what I do in other areas of my life.

I think in my life I have tried to use this lesson other places and it has been beneficial.  Anywhere I am with other people I feel like if we’re not competitors than we’re on the same team.  Part of being on a team is helping lift each other up.  A city, a startup community, a Meetup group is no different than a gym in this regard.  There is the cliché that we can all achieve more this way.  Some clichés do hold true and this is one.  Sometimes we are forced to work together and sometimes we choose too. 

A town is forced to work together to some degree to function as a community.  In the gym it’s often a necessity to work together as well.  You need people to spot you and assist with other tasks in the gym, and in the gym all we got is each other.  This forces some community fast.  We can also be proactive about building this up.  We can workout together and really create partnerships in our pursuit of all the fruits of the iron.  I’ve tried to do this with other pursuits in my life as well.  It can work with career pursuits, family relationships and more.  I see so much opportunity for growth with this way of thinking too.  I have seen communities where no one buys each other’s products, or reads each other’s books.  I can’t help but think there is a better way, and I learned that way in the gym.  The gym is where I have learned almost everything I know about life.

Was this cold morning where I got a weight room mentor a turning point in my life?  It very might have been, it did help push me the right direction.  I got a few lessons and a good example of how to act in the gym.  Shane helped me a lot when he didn’t need to.  We can’t have too much this kind of thing in our life.  So wherever you are and whatever you’re doing Shane, thanks!

The Useful Strong Stuff Journal Vol. 23

Lately I have been thinking about the book The 4-Hour Workweek.  Like countless million people out there I bought the book and implemented things from it.  I never found the mythical workweek I looked for, but I picked up a few good tricks and ideas from the book.  A lasting thought from that book is to think more experimentally about life.

This book helped me see that life could be run as a series of experiments and structured in all sorts of ways. 

Lately I have been trying to get more experimental.

I have started doing some graphic work for fun.  What I will create remains to be seen.  I like that it is training a different part of my brain than I usually use.

I am attempting to expose myself to more sources of perspective.  I’ve been listening to some random top podcasts.  So far all I have learned from that is that young people with podcasts are weird.  They have a lot of drama too.  They also seem to have no real skills or abilities.  Also they all make more money than I do, so what do I know?  This experiment is partly to try and stay on top of some pop culture, I’m not sure there is value to that particular goal.  I might just be getting old though.

I have a whole spreadsheet of things I want to play with.  Experiments feel a whole lot like playing.

I am looking for more experiments.  I am looking for co-conspirators on some of these.  I am interested in podcasts and YouTube videos.  I have no interest in doing these alone.  Having partners and a team is an experiment itself.  I usually do a lot of things in my life alone.  I’m not sure that is really the best.

Experiments seem to also be an excuse to be wacky.  I like having an excuse to do that. 

Experiments breed possibilities too.  So things are about to get a lot wackier and interesting around here.

So did I get anything I wanted from The 4-Hour Workweek?  Nope I didn’t get the riches and freedom I wanted.  I did get the idea of being more experimental.  My mind keeps coming back to this idea over the years.  This might be the sign of a good book.  Even when we don’t get what we expect from a book, we can still get some nuggets of value.  Which makes reading books sound a lot like an experiment to me.

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

Some things to consider when training around pain.  https://tonygentilcore.com/2021/01/factors-to-consider-when-training-around-pain/

Good video on common mistakes made when doing glute ham raises.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fprB_1sWb6s

This is a really good video that goes over the principles of using exercise variations to help manage fatigue.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-owlwBw4AyU

Thankful for Rubber Bands

Gyms are kind of a weird place right now from where I sit.  COVID has made going to a gym with other people a very questionable practice right now.  I have chosen not to go to gyms for a while longer during all this.  The gym is supposed to be about health and catching a virus isn’t all that healthy.  Despite avoiding gyms my mind and body still want to work out.  I have had to resort to park workouts on playground equipment and garage workouts using an assortment of light weights and bands.  I am grateful that even without having many tools to workout with, I can get so much exercise still.

Having some tools means I can workout.  I have all the tools needed to train my whole body.  I choose to be grateful to have these tools.  The opposite choice is also available to me.  I could be angry I cannot workout in gyms in the manner I prefer.  There is little benefit to this approach, therefor I choose gratitude for the equipment I do have.  I have some of the stuff I want access to, and there is gratitude to be found in having some even if we want all of something.

I am really grateful I had a couple good exercise bands laying around.  These are becoming the base of my workouts.  With them I can exercise things I just can’t easily do with my dumbbells.  A clever person could train the whole body with just exercise bands and bodyweight.  That is one thing about a pandemic is that it can force us to be clever.  I am grateful to have these simple tools, they have been a lifesaver. 

I think being grateful and maximizing limited tools is something we can all try to do.  These tools might be a slow laptop, or a few exercise bands instead of a full gym.  It is all the same.  With gratitude for the tools I have, I have gotten more fit and gotten better.  Without gratitude I would have stayed weaker, and that is never good.

More Chess is More Fun

Several weeks ago I got the idea in my head to look online and see if there were any chess sites I liked playing on.   It didn’t take very long for me to find one that was simple and gave me all the chess fun I could handle.  I started playing for a good while that first night.  The next few days I found myself coming back more and more.  I had gotten sucked into being a chess player, and was having a lot of good fun.  Weeks later I am playing nearly every night and still having a lot of fun doing so.  In chess I have found a hobby that is perfectly suited for me.

Chess can be both a social or antisocial game.  Playing with friends in person has always been something I have enjoyed.  With all the online chess platforms, it can also be done at 3am by myself from the comfort of my garage office fort.  I like this flexibility, if I want to play, I can.  Chess is really a game that is whatever I choose to make of it.

I can choose to be serious about winning, or just play for laughs.  I do really enjoy playing random openings or weird strategies just for fun.  This serves no purpose other than my own amusement.  If I am in a mood to win, I can take things seriously and think long and hard about my moves.  I can do whatever I want with the game, and it really doesn’t matter to anyone else.  That is one of the things about chess I like so much, is that it can be so many things.

A game of chess can take a few minutes or a few hours depending on what time constraints you choose.

You can study to get better, or just make it up as you go.

A game of chess can be so many things.  Mostly I am grateful that chess is fun and it’s a good mental playground.  I can use that playground to sharpen my mind.  I can also use it to forget about the world for a little bit.  I’m just grateful that I enjoy this game, and get to use it for all sorts of fun.

The Useful Strong Stuff Journal Vol. 22

Today I had a long list of everything I reasonably could want from the day.  It was a simple list, but full of things I did not think was likely to happen.  Then I got everything I thought I was wanting from the day.  I then proceeded to toss away the things I had been given.

What did I want from the day?  I wanted peace and quiet.  I wanted the mental space to work on projects.  I wanted to finish this newsletter for the week and publish it.  I got all this.  Everyone had left the house for the whole day and given me a perfect work environment to tackle the things I wanted to tackle.  I then proceeded to waste all this quality time I had been gifted.

The hours of the day melted away and I didn’t even really try to get anything done.  I had spent an hour this morning thinking about what I wanted to do to.  I had gone for a long walk and thought of all the things I would be doing if I just had peace and quiet.  Then I was given that peace and quiet.  What did throwing away all this time today even mean?

I have been telling myself for a while now that lack of peace and quiet is a huge hurdle to my workflow.  Working from home is distracting, and I thought it was a reason I wasn’t doing enough work.  Today I got that good work environment I dreamed of and nothing happened.  Perhaps the obstacles to my progress are not entirely what I perceive them to be.   They may be something else entirely.

I can’t say that I will find any profound lessons from wasting my day today.  This newsletter is still getting published.  Today has proven I’m not as smart as I think I am.

I’m not smart enough to know all the roadblocks to my productivity.  I thought I had but one roadblock, and that was proven untrue.  

I am not smart enough to keep this thing from happening again and again.  I have wasted time in similar circumstances so many times. 

I am not smart enough to capitalize when I’m given everything I want and say that I need.  How many other times have I been given all the tools and resources and done nothing with them in my life?

I am not smart enough to come to any conclusions for this newsletter.

If only I had time to come to some conclusions then I would have some good conclusions.  If only I had a few hours of peace and quiet I could get something good written down to conclude this newsletter.  We now know that is a lie.  When I say “If only…” I am just tricking myself.  When I say “If only…” there are likely a lot of problems in the way.  Thinking there is one when there are many, that is a mind trap for all us to avoid.

There is the conclusion, that only came about because I had no conclusions.

My Favorite Things

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

A good article on things going differently than planned.  https://www.elitefts.com/education/it-wasnt-what-i-thought-it-would-be/

A good article on using variation in training.  https://www.strongfirst.com/introducing-the-strongfirst-wod/

Mental Fitness

I found this a good article to remind me about mental programming and choosing how I view things.  https://joshstrength.com/2021/01/10-ways-to-program-your-mind-for-success-genetic-engineering/

Getting the French Fries Right

Next time you are at a brewpub or local dive look around at the other tables and look at how many tables have French fries at them.  French fries touch almost every table, often they touch every plate at the table.  The next part in our exercise is for you to think how many places you have been that had awful French fries.  So many restaurants are messing up with a food item that hits every table.  This blows my mind.  If you have excellent French fries at your restaurant you have the chance to put something on nearly every plate that makes people happy.  I keep thinking about this a lot, and what this whole concept means when applied to life.

Most of us are not restauranteurs, our ability to make French fries does not matter.  In our daily pursuits however, we often will have things that take the place of French fries.  When I talk about French fries, I’m talking about something that hits almost every customer or person we interact.  I am talking about something we are very capable of getting right too.  These “French fries” will be different things for everyone, but we all have them.  What I wonder is how many of us are messing them up all the time.

If we are looking at ourselves critically, I think we are likely to find a French fry or two we are messing up.  When I ran a Meetup group, I used to be lazy about reaching out to guest speakers.  If I had been more proactive about this, so many of our meetings could have been better.  When I didn’t focus on this, we ended up with sub-par speeches thrown together at the last minute, or no speaker at all.  This was a French fry.  This one is easy to see but I can’t help but think I have more I need to find.

Finding our repeated faults and acknowledging them can make such a big difference.  It can be as simple as recognizing what tasks we do across all or most of our projects and simply asking can this be done better?  If the answer is yes, there is then the time to evaluate whether this task or aspect of the project matters.  Many things can be improved, but they have to matter.  If they matter there could be huge upside to fixing them. 

One time this proved huge for me is changing my warmups to my workouts.  I used to have a modest warmup for my workouts.  Due to some injuries and age I have started to do a more thorough warmup.  I diligently prepare myself to lift hard with every workout.  Fixing this one thing has lead to me being stronger and having less minor injuries.  It was an easy thing to get right and I notice the impacts across all workouts now.

Now I’m telling you French fries are important, but so are other things.  If we go back to our restaurant example with a limited menu you could really get everything right.  If you get the French fries right, if you get the bun right, if you get your house sauce right, you are on your way to having every meal be good.   All of which can be done by just focusing on the things that hit every plate.

This whole post seems really simple and silly.  At the same time, how many restaurants serve really awful cold French fries?  A lot of them do, and they are missing so much opportunity.  As I have thought about this I’ve started thinking I’m serving more than a few awful French fries up in my life as well.  I am horrible at following up with people I meet.  I am awful at creating a good writing environment for myself.  These kind of mistakes hit across so many projects and efforts.  So you can say I’m thinking a lot about the French fries, and trying to make sure every plate gets hit with a dose of awesome.  Hitting each plate with a dose of awesome gets you halfway to the meal being good.  Businesses, careers, and legacies are built on serving up good meals, so there is no reason not to serve up some good fries.

The Useful Strong Stuff Journal Vol. 21

It is the holiday season, we just had Christmas and New Year’s Eve is tomorrow.  That means a lot of people are setting some goals for the next year.  I set a few goals for 2021 myself.  There were a lot of goals I almost set.

I almost set the goal to become really good at chess.  With the goal of even playing tournaments and trying to get a “Master” rating and title.

Writing and publishing a blogpost every single day of the year sounded like a productive and fun thing.

Regaining my computer coding ability that I have lost always sounds good.

I tossed out all these ideas.  There was too much weight to these goals.  I can do things with some weigh to them.  Right now, these are too heavy for me.

My brain for whatever reason likes “do something every day for a whole year” type of goals.  To pull off the above goals, I would have to work almost daily at any of them to pull it off.  Doing something daily takes a lot of effort and work, it also means you rearrange life to get it done.  Daily requires a level of obsession I’m just not ready for at the moment.

I almost slipped into setting goals like this anyways.  I didn’t think about the weight of what those goals really meant.  I started off 2020 writing and publishing blogposts for something like the first 60 days of the year.  It started to become the only thing on my mind and an obsession.  This habit was starting to rule my life.  I finally broke my streak, and it was like a weight was lifted.

As I get a little smarter, I try to think about the weight of things.  I have set some weighty goals for 2021.  If I pull them off there should be some good benefits.  Weighty goals for things like hobbies though, I’m not going down that path again.

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

A nice article on fixing weak points in the squat with minimal equipment.  https://www.t-nation.com/training/the-squat-one-barbell-no-weak-points

This hack was so simple I had to include it in the newsletter.  https://dieselsc.com/upgrade-your-back-training/

I found this to be a good straightforward article on improving the bar path in the bench press.  This is something a lot of people have trouble doing right, and it’s easy to fix in a lot of cases.  https://www.strongfirst.com/bench-press-more-by-optimizing-your-bar-path/