Expectations and Effort - A Perspective

I've been doing a lot of thinking lately about expectations. It seems that expectations can be,  depending on who you talk to,  good or bad, positive or negative, useful or useless. What I have to believe is my posture with regard to this conundrum ties directly with my primal living theme.....

Come along with me on a little ride back in time:

I wake up 10,000 years ago and the sun is bright and I am still alive.... phew, made it through another night. What are my expectations? I guess I would expect that I was going to have to work really, really hard once again to survive the day. If I put in the work I would have food, clothing ( gotta love a nice lion cloth made of tiger fur ) and shelter. If I am really lucky my family might also survive the next 24 hours with me.

Ok, lets fast forward back to reality and what do we see..........

College graduates who are expecting to make 6 figures with their first job. Men and women alike expecting to take some magic pills or special juice that will transform them from blubbery slobs into Rich Froning or Camille Leblanc Bazinet. Individuals who expect the food industry to just make things healthier for them while shoving chicken nuggets in their gullet. Parents expecting teachers to raise their kids as they snort their Adderall and attend wine socials disguised as PTA meetings. Coddled kids who do not know how to handle defeat or failure because they expect to get a three foot high trophy for finishing in 12th place. I could do this forever but I'm bored with it already and you get the point.

Anyway, expectations do not exist in a vacuum. They exist within a context of knowing and accepting an appropriate level of work and dedication needed to achieve those expectations. With every expectation comes a responsibility to own the work required to reach it. If you expect to look like CLB then you better be ready to work your ass off for years. You want a six figure income right out of college, you better be prepared to choose your path early and dedicate yourself solely to your academic endeavors. You want a trophy, win something. Accordingly, if you want to be a fat slob, do nothing. If you wish to lead a life of quiet desperation as Thoreau so perfectly put it, then by all means you can easily accept the work required to do that. Either way, own it, hone it and move forward.

A great Woody Harrelson quote from "Friends With Benefits"

"hey, everyone wants a shortcut in life. my guidebook is very simple: you want to lose weight? stop eating, fatty! you want to make money? work your ass off, lazy! you want to be happy? find someone you like and never let him go, or her, if you’re into that kinda creepy shit."

That's all for now.... live primal my friends.

Lessons from the SNATCH

So I purposely used the eye catching title only to get you reading.... stick with me.

The snatch is, and has been, my frienemy for quite some time now..... every time I think I have it, something else creeps its way into my mind and my technique goes totally haywire. But that's whats great about it too. I am of the mindset that a person can learn a lot about themselves at the bottom of a snatch, including important life lessons.

1.  Embrace what you suck at and attack it head on.  Do not shy away from something because of the degree of difficulty. Great things never happen without some risk taking.

2.  The shortest distance between two points is....... execution. Lines don't draw themselves.  Learn to do things the right way and all of a sudden some of the hardest challenges become effortless. Execute well and execute often .

3. We will only fail at the margins of our experiences, by expanding what we experience everyday, we are ensuring our future success.

4. Obstacles are what we see when we take our eyes off of our goals. This one really resonates with me. When I focus on where I want to be by years end with the snatch my mind stops thinking about the points of performance that I am still not mastering. Just like life, focus on the goal, enjoy the journey.

5. There are things in life that should be done because they make us better at everything else. In Fitness its the snatch, dead-lift, and squat. In life I think its reading, getting outside, learning about others, and paying attention to what we eat.

So there it is, my five life lessons gleaned from the feeling that my whole body is going to explode when I hit the bottom position. As always, live primal my friends...............