“You have to be burning with ‘an idea, or a problem, or a wrong that you want to right.’ If you’re not passionate enough from the start, you’ll never stick it out.”
You must love what you do to be truly successful. You have to want to do it. The reason behind your training, your goal, and your idea of success has to be strong enough for you to stay with it. This holds true whether success means reaching your goals or just the fact that you enjoy doing something worthwhile.
If you hate training a certain way, then change it up and find something better suited for you. Not every day will be full of passion, but you’ve got to love what you do enough to get back at it, to do it regardless, and then come back again every day.
Maybe you love running, but have been doing something else because someone told you to. If that is the case, don’t listen to anyone else – go run! Don’t follow the crowd or the latest fad. Find what you enjoy, then own it. That passion will keep you striving for more and the result will be real results.
It might take a while to find your passion or your place, but you’ll know it is right when you see and feel the results. Don’t settle. Just like a relationship, it won’t always be easy or romantic but it will be worth it.
<strong”>”Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles.”
Technique develops over time and concentration must be put on form first, no matter what you are training to do. You are going to get far more out of training the right way, then you will by throwing stuff together without learning the techniques or having a smart gameplan. Take the time to learn, to ask questions, to study others, to hire a coach, and to get a personalized program.
Be open to critique, do your research, and always be coachable. You will thank yourself later. You can and will train longer and more efficiently by being injury-free. You will get faster results that keep growing and exceeding your current level. Those results will keep you coming back day after day.
If you are not getting results, you might need to reevaluate your plan and your technique. Don’t waste time doing things the wrong way, but instead, save your time (and money) and make your time more valuable by training the right way.
<strong”>”I’m convinced that about half of what separates successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.”
What separates competitors? The winners from losers? Those who reaching and exceed their goals from the quitters? Perseverance. Results don’t happen overnight, and one workout or one training session a week won’t cut it. One healthy meal a week isn’t going to get you “cut” either.
Even for those on-point, there will be bad days here and there, no matter who you are. Small changes are a good start until you can build a routine, but consistency is where real results are found. Results are built one workout at a time. The more you training sessions you build up using a program that works for you (as opposed to one designed for everyone), the better you’ll end up – and you’ll get there faster.
Just like an idea is a start for a business, but a business isn’t built with just an idea. The success of that idea takes time and many factors in place to make it a reality. There will be setbacks in anything worthwhile that you ever do, but to persevere and to continue on training or striving despite those setbacks builds character.
Be the person who won’t quit with a setback. How you persevere and recover is the thing that will set you far ahead of the competition.
<strong”>“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”
Are you training the way you want to train? How do you feel about yourself and where you are? Are you comparing yourself to others based on the popular trend or with unrealistic goals? Now from there, how are you going to move forward?
One of the biggest obstacles people face is time. But no matter how limited our time might be, what we do with the time we have makes all the difference. There are people training at 4:00am. There are people who skip lunch to go for a run or to the gym. You could even do a quick bodyweight workout with the extra ten or fifteen minutes you find throughout the day.
If you were to write out a chart of your entire day, then place a star next to every time you could have been doing something else, you might surprise yourself with how much time you waste. It is going to come down to deciding what is most important to you and what you are willing to sacrifice. From there, you determine your useful and efficient allocation of time.
You have to want to reach your fitness goal to be up when everyone else is asleep or to give up a few niceties. That’s what it takes and your goals (should) matter more than the things you sacrifice if you’re going to get there.
<strong”>“Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.”
A failure can be one of the best training tools for succeeding in life – and in your fitness and training. Failures teach us lessons on what to do or not to do again in the future. Failing is also character-building and strength-building in so many ways. It is not easy to get back up after a fall or to have your ego bruised a bit. Instead of shutting down or ignoring the sitaution, take a realistic evaluation of what actually happened, learn from it, and then move on – stronger and smarter.
Do not be afraid to fail. I use a weightlifting analogy with all of my athletes: “You have to bail to get better.” If you are always afraid of what might happen when you drop a bar from overhead, you might never pick it up. You’ll miss an opportunity, reaching your potential, or a chance to succeed at something you might have once thought impossible.
The feeling of accomplishment or success that comes after overcoming a hardship, a setback, a failing, is worth every effort to never ever quit trying.
Photos courtesy of Katie Chasey and RXBound.
