Moving 1 inch might set you free to travel an eternity...

I was reading something from Tom at Mindhacks about an experience he has while rock-climbing and I started to relate it to other life situations that it also applies to.

Tom was saying that he frequently has an experience while rock-climbing in which he finds himself stuck in a situation that doesn’t offer any good hand holds to help him move forward. Nor backward even. In his mind - he’s stuck, there’s no real option that exists at that moment in time because his mind is limited to not seeing any options. Everything that he wants to advance toward is just out of reach by only a little bit. Enough that he knows if he tries to go for a big stretch he’s going to fall.

I’m no expert, but I climb some simple routes. Climbing rocks is strange because you really don’t have all that long to find your next hold and get there before you run out of strength. It’s always a matter of time… superman would run out of strength at some point if he was stuck.

As the mind searches - confidently at first and then frantically before the body runs out of energy to hold him where he is… something must happen.

What happens is he realizes he has feet. He stops looking for handholds - which might be two or three feet away and starts looking for a new foothold to support him. A new foothold means he can move just a little bit. Maybe it’s only an inch or so. That might be ALL IT TAKES to enable him to see new hand holds from that new vantage point.

One inch in any direction might the the key to getting the whole way up the mountain, ridge, whatever he’s climbing.

You too.

One inch in any direction starts the ball rolling and it brings to the surface new possibilities… If you are truly stuck where you are - and you probably aren’t, you’re just blind to the possibilities that exist, you might need to move an inch in some direction. Doesn’t matter what direction - go backwards if you can’t go forward or parallel to where you are.

I was sitting here at my notebook computer thinking about how I should post something to Aim for Awesome because it’s been a few days. I have been smashed between some big SEO projects and I really want to give my clients the best I can so I’ve been consumed by them for the last week.

I didn’t have the slightest idea what to write about ten minutes ago. I was stuck. I stepped an inch by telling my friend what my problem was. Not expecting any answer, just wanting to share with her the strangeness of not being able to switch gears from SEO mode and optimizing websites for Google and being creative enough to write an article about something interesting for all of you.

She said immediately, “Don’t you have a stock of article’s you’ve already written that you could use?”

Initially I tried to play it off… “Yes, but I just don’t feel like editing one and making it live.”

Then I realized - wow, she gave me the answer… let me take the ball and run (or jog at least).

I said, “OK, let me open up the folder and see if anything jumps out at me.”

This article did. It reminded me of climbing, which I’m really starting to love… that was just enough to get me interested in reading Tom’s article again and then writing up this one for you.

Go an inch - any direction and see what happens.

If you’re ever stuck in any situation try it. Move an inch.

Moving an inch might equate to:

• Making one phone call.
• Talking to a friend about it.
• Taking one less sip of your bottle of scotch tonight.
• Trying a different style ad on your web site.
• Cutting your hair off.
• Picking up the next phone call instead of ignoring it.
• Giving a pregnant woman begging for money $10.00.
• Going outside to exercise instead of on your stationary bike.

It could mean anything, depending on the situation you find your self “stuck in”.

Frequently I think we’re not really stuck - we’re blinded to possibility. Possibility exists in every situation. Sometimes we’re just blind to it.

Open up your eyes by moving an inch any direction and see what happens…

As I get into my forties sometimes I find reality confronting me about something. I’m not on top of the world like I thought I might be by 30. I haven’t made it by 40 either. I had this idea since high school that by thirty I’d be wildly successful and on top of the world - the world at my feet so to speak. Maybe you had that idea too? Seems fairly common!

While it’s true I’ve had a hell of an amazing life so far and had plenty of success at things I’ve done - plenty of failure too, I’m not where I thought I’d be back then.

Dont’ misunderstand… I’m quite happy where I am right now. Quite comfortable with how little I have and want. I literally don’t want anything else but what I have now… but still comes this question out of the recesses of my twisting blob of cerebellum.

What can I do for the world?

While Bill Gates created Windows and Microsoft that wasn’t near his greatest feat. I count giving away billions of dollars to humanitarian causes as much more important. Nothing is more disgusting than those with uber-cash keeping for themselves or using it in nefarious ways to make more uber-cash. That’s gotta be wrong. Doesn’t it?

People are decoding the human genome. I read recently about a guy that was no kind of student in high school and college… served in the Vietnam war… and then went back to college in his 30’s or 40’s. He’s now one of the top genetic researchers on the planet.

What happened?

A: He ran with the ball.

Am I going to run with the ball and contribute to a few million people’s lives? BILLIONS of lives? I have that deep drive to do so… but I haven’t really given myself the challenge. It’s been there… hovering around back there - occasionally popping into the conscious. But, I never really LOOKED at the question before.

I want to look at it now for myself. I want to ask myself all the questions that need asked about this. I’m intrigued by it. My curiosity is running willy-nilly (as mom used to say).

There are some ultra-smart people reading this blog. People that have godlike IQ’s, straight A degrees at Harvard, Yale, MIT, and 100 other awesome schools.

There are those of you with drive and ambition that put you in the top 1% on the planet of people with such traits.

Some of you have ten hours a day to do whatever you choose. I fall in this category. I’ve chosen to write, produce videos, books, e-books and help people online with whatever they need done.

Are we all living up to our potential?

Why not ask yourself the BIG question - What can I do for the whole world?

I challenge all of you reading this blog to face this bigger than life question.

Yesterday when I began thinking about this topic in earnest I asked myself another question that seemed natural…

“What was the best idea you ever had?”

What the #*$@!!?

The lights flickered when I asked myself that question. I’m an idea machine. I think you could pit me against a think-tank of 5 people and give us a topic to brainstorm ideas about over one hour and I would come up with more. Not at all joking. For some reason I’m able to look at a question from many angles and come up with ideas about it - possible solutions, outcomes, challenges.

I wrote here before that I’m a big picture kind of person. That is true… and the main reason is that I can think of a huge variety of material related to a question, a project, or a hypothetical. I haven’t always been like this - early on in my teens and early twenties I couldn’t put together a line of thought to save my life. Attention Deficit Disorder ruled my life at that time. From mid-twenties on I’ve been able to churn out ideas by the hundreds whenever I choose.

So - I began going through ideas I could remember. Mostly that included the ones that left an impression on me or that I wrote down in some of my journal entries. The rest have been lost as the neural network couldn’t possibly store them all.

I opened Excel and started on a list of past ideas… Of course just this exercise prompted new ideas so I had to make another column for new ideas…

I got to 87 ideas I’ve remembered from the past and thought - it must be here already. If it was really the best idea I’d have remembered it and put it in the first 87 I thought of. Wouldn’t I?

Not necessarily.

I kept thinking… I got to 130 and stopped again. I looked back at the last 43 I’d written after I almost stopped and realized there were some damn good ideas in that group.

When should I stop?

I decided I’d make it a few day exercise and call it a game on Sunday (tomorrow).

I’ll go back to it after I write this post because I’ve already remembered a couple things I don’t think I’ve added to the list yet.

As I look over the list there are a lot of ideas that wouldn’t make a bit of difference to the whole world. There are ideas for video games. I’ve drawn maps and planned in detail a really fun video game for smart people that I thought at one time would be a blast to do, but never did. I have viral e-card ideas. I have book ideas. Movie ideas. Movie scripts outlined. I’ve had negative ideas about creating sites that today I’d never go forward with. Back then it was anything goes. I’ve mellowed quite a bit. I’ve embraced a real karma type outlook with life recently. Not that I believe in the idea of getting something back, but just DOING the right thing seems to be a great idea that I can’t make myself go against if I wanted to. It’s like a new morality - maybe it started about 7 years ago. In the present it’s really taken hold and it’s a great feeling.

Maybe it was some of the impetus behind the question…

What can I do for the world?

There must be something. I’m fairly intelligent. I have time. If I don’t find the idea among those I’ve already had then surely I can think of one. I must be able to think of something. It should be as big an idea as possible.

You should take yourself through this process too.

Why be average?
Why be great just in your own little world?

I’ve always been happy with what I’ve achieved… not really satisfied, but you know… I’ve only been looking at being the best in my little niche of the world.

There’s a HUGE world out there that is struggling with many problems that perhaps I could contribute some solution or work toward solving. Maybe I have something inside I can share and help a huge group of people. Maybe mankind. I’d never know unless I asked myself the question and got moving toward making it a reality.

Some people KNOW they need to ask themselves that question. You might know someone like that. Some people just fall into it, challenging themselves to be great in their small world which leads to greatness for the entire world.

I think every person reading this blog has it within them to do something that affects the entire world in a positive way.

What is it?

Best of Life!

Vern

Update: Recently Google has announced a contest where they’ll accept entries with ideas that will change the world to help the most people. Awesome huh? Here is my new post about it: How Can I Change the World?

This is the last article in a series about pushing yourself while exercising and it is entitled, “Pushing Yourself During Exercise: Competition.“  This technique can be applied to any exercise, but in this series I’ll talk about running and walking/running up steps. Those are the two exercises I do most frequently.

This series covers:

1. Getting Out the Door to Exercise.
2. Visual Imagery.
3. Shaming Yourself.
4. Positive Self Talk.
5. Delay of Gratification.
6. Coaching Yourself.
7. Competition.

You might be thinking that I’m going to cover competition as in racing or joining friends for your exercise so you can push each other to greatness. That’s an amazing technique, but one that everyone already knows. In this series about pushing yourself past current levels of fitness I wanted to give you some techniques you may not have heard of.

Pushing yourself through competition goes like this…

Usually I use this technique when I’m feeling unmotivated or even a little down about the state of my run, step climbing, swim, bicycle ride or whatever I happen to be doing. I realize there’s no spunk in my effort and I need something to pick me up and get me up to at least a moderate pace.

In my mind I assemble a group of my competition. My running competition? Nope. I blog in the motivational / life development area with Aim for Awesome so my competition (though really they are not directly competing with me) are people like: Steve Pavlina; Yaro Starak; Albert Foong of Urbanmonk.net; Leo Babauta of ZenHabits.net; Donald Latumahina at LifeOptimizer.org and others. There are so many more. Usually I name a group of twelve. I know what they look like and I picture their natural running style and abilities based on how well their blogs are doing. Choose competitors from whatever area you are striving to excel in. For me, it’s blogging.

I guess the people I named aren’t really direct competition, but they are my role-models and those that I’m striving to equal and eventually surpass online. They’ve got far more readers than I have and they have a high standard for their writing - one that I aspire to. My writing is obviously different and I’m not sure if it has mass appeal yet - but, I’ll find out in a year or so. Anyway, back to the mind-trick.

I picture each person close to me and running with me at first. We’re all in a group and none of us is feeling all that great. This makes me realize, I can beat all of them today because as bad as I feel, I’ve been running all my life. I can crank it up a notch and drop some of them right now.

I go just a little bit faster and see who starts to drop away. I see who picks it up to match me. There are some fighters in the group and I know I’m going to be kicking my own ass to get going as fast as I need to in order to beat them. After the first couple slow slightly I devise a plan. I say to myself, “Around that corner is the slight upgrade. Pretend to go slow right now and then crank it up just around that corner to a 75% effort and see who drops!”

And so I do. I drop a few people there. Steve Pavlina, Yaro Starak, Darren Rowse, Donald Latumahina and a couple others are still with me. Damn they won’t give up.

Depending how I feel I’ll either map out a long-term run strategy where I gradually pick up the pace dropping off everyone except Steve Pavlina or I’ll do some mini-bursts of speed usually up hills to drop people. Steve is great at the high speed, long distance, but I use hills to wear him down - the up and down wear him out. I love the hills so that’s where I destroy him.

Hahaa, it sounds funny as I write it but! I’m not joking at all. This is a very powerful technique that I love to use. I combine this mental competition with both positive self talk and with self coaching to bring out the best in me on bad days. Almost always it succeeds in motivating me to go faster.  Sometimes Steve wins and I vow to break him the next time we run. Sometimes Darren Rowse pulls away and beats both me and Steve. Sometimes Donald comes from behind in a surprise pass that leaves me dumbfounded until I regroup.

Though I haven’t read about any top runners at the international level using mind games to push themselves to greatness like those I’ve written about here, I KNOW they must exist. I guess if you had some really good techniques that you could call on during your deepest moments of suffering during hard exercise that would make you crank even harder you’d keep those a secret. Top secret.

I don’t have many secrets, so I shared the few techniques I use that came easily to mind. As I experience more or as I remember more I’ll post them here to help you take your exercise to a new level.

I use this Competition technique for pushing myself harder about once a week on average. One key to using these techniques is not using them every time you exercise. I use each of these techniques maybe once a week on average. But, sometimes I plan stage races where I race the same group of people over 3 days. I might even include Lance Armstrong as a runner in the pack. I visualize snapping his persistence like a dry twig as we push up a long hill…  haha.

“Eat my dust Lance!“

So then, try this technique as you need it. Be creative with your own ideas and let me know if you come up with anything cool that I can try while I run or bike.

Best of Life!

Vern

This is a series on pushing yourself while exercising. It can be applied to any exercise, but in this series I’ll talk about running and walking/running up steps. Those are the two exercises that I do daily - one or the other.

This series will cover:

1. Getting Out the Door to Exercise.
2. Visual Imagery.
3. Shaming Yourself.
4. Positive Self Talk.
5. Delay of Gratification.
6. Coaching Yourself.
7. Competition.

This blog post is the sixth in the series about pushing yourself to get the most out of your physical exercise and is entitled, “Coaching Yourself“.

I played soccer from the time I was six until I graduated high school. When I entered 8th grade I met my soccer coach, Mr. Spolar. He was a physical education teacher at another nearby school and he’d been coaching soccer at my high school for six years already. Coach Spolar had an excellent history of creating great soccer teams. Our school, though small was renown for playing Quad A soccer though we were only a Double A school. Coach Spolar never smiled. Coach Spolar was my worst nightmare for four years.

We had a path that was 9/10th of a mile around our high school field. About four complete soccer fields could fit into this area. Coach would make us run around this loop not just on good days, but even if we were sick or had some injury that prohibited us from practicing but that jogging wouldn’t hurt. If someone had a stomach ache or headache coach would make them run around the field. If someone had a broken arm coach would make them run around the field.

He never looked up to see how many times they circled, he never gave it a second thought. After he told you to start running you ran until the end of practice. Sometimes that was two hours later. Sometimes three. One player ran around the loop 18 times over a three hour practice. One dared not stop or the assistant coach would tell him and coach would blow the whistle and make the entire team run around the loop for the entire practice. Or worse, he’d make us line up for 100 yard sprints or suicides. The worst exercise in his repertoire was “hills” which is the topic of a whole new post if I ever want to relive them. One of coach’s primary beliefs was that the entire team got punished for any infraction of an individual. Of course that individual later got the hell beat out of him so it didn’t pay to be the one causing coach grief.

Coach loved “3 a days” in the Summer. You know how most kids have off for the summer to do as they wish? Coach made us practice 3 times every day during the peak of summer heat. We’d have 2 hours in the morning working on springs, suicides, hills and individual ball control skills. In the afternoon it was team skill building for 2 hours. In the evening we’d play small practice games offense on defense for 3 hours. Seven hours of practice each day rain or shine. We much preferred the rain.

Coach Spolar told us on numerous occasions:

“What you see here. Do here. Hear here.
Stays here when you leave here.”

Coach knew some of his tactics would cause outrage among parents, probably get him fired as a coach and teacher in the school system. So, nobody was ever to find out. None of us dared to tell.

When coach got in your face to gripe you out it was as if the blood in his head was boiling and he was going to explode. He would be one inch from one of your eyeballs and screaming and spitting as he did so. Spittle would cover your cheek, lips and even get into your eye. If you flinched he got more angry. He could fire that temper up in an instant and be jacking somebody up in no time if he saw them either

1.) Being lazy.
2.) Not doing what he told us to do.

One of his favorite tortures, he had many, was making a player hold a half-pushup position until, arms spasming they gave out. We had a couple guys that could hold that position almost indefinitely. He’d rest his foot on their shoulders as he talked to the team. When someone’s arms gave out before he thought they should he’d get in the player’s face and scream at them until they got back up and held it again. The second time he told them if they dropped again they were dropped from the team. Coach was went way beyond the level of being a bastard, but we did win the state championship in my senior year.

It was coach’s anger and seriousness in the back of my subconscious that created this form of pushing myself to exert more when I feel like I’m at the end of my resources. It seems to have just occured naturally during my hard exercise one time. I realized I was yelling at myself in my mind to keep going, to push it harder. It wasn’t my voice though. Coach was STILL IN MY HEAD!

How this usually happens is just that, it happens on it’s own. It’s my self-talk that just pops up when I need it to push me a lot harder. Maybe I’ve already done a hellacious workout and I’m tired and don’t feel like pushing anymore. I start telling myself in a low growl like coach used to do…

“Get your ass up that hill and do it faster than anybody else or you’ll be sitting on the bench for the next 2 games. You understand me?”

“YES SIR.” I yelled. (Oh, I forgot to tell you - we had to address everything as YES SIR or we’d suffer for it.

“What did you say?” He’d ask menacingly.

“YES SIR!” I’d scream at the top of my lungs so anyone up at the school 300 yards away could hear it.

“That’s what I thought, now bust your ass up this hill and don’t let one person beat you. YOU GOT THAT?”

“YES SIR!” I yelped out, louder than before.

Reliving those episodes in my mind I’m able to push myself beyond what I ever thought once I start coaching myself just like coach Spolar used to do. I’m amazed that the old feeling comes back - the feeling that there is no chance to get out of what he just said. It must be done because the consequences are much worse than the effort to be expended.

This technique works magic on me. If there’s nobody around, I growl out orders to myself out loud and it works even better. This is the only technique that has the power to literally transform me and make me do something. It never failed. Not once.

I’m sure it can work for you too - even if you didn’t have an insane coach during your younger years. You could make it your dad’s voice. Or create a coach in your mind that is relentless and that will not accept failure to do exactly what he/she tells you. Start talking to yourself in a very forceful and unrelenting way.

“Pick up the pace now, you better be doing 7 minute miles over the next two miles!”
“If you walk, you’re not coming back here to exercise for 3 days. You want to waste three days?”
“Reel that guy in that’s 150 yards away by the time you make another lap. DO IT NOW.”
“Don’t EVER say you can’t do something as simple as this. GET your A&& moving and don’t stop until I say you’re finished!”

Try those or be creative with your own. I get much more creative cursively but better not to have those here in the blog!

Try it!

Best of Life!

Vern