For those who possess absolute control over their mind and body, the strength of willpower, everything is possible.
Let’s consider willpower to be the ability to make decisions based on how much you will gain from them in the long-term. Let yourself think of it as the skill of not letting the prospect of short term pleasures distract you from achieving the goals which your passions have led you to conceive.
There is one very common misconception about willpower. Willpower cannot be relinquished to tomorrow to complete today’s work. Every single time you put something off, you are weakening your ability to ever attend to it. Procrastination is a doom loop. "Later on I will want to do what I don’t want to do right now," it is one of the most common of all human fallacies. The fact is that later on you will most likely still not want to do whatever it is that needed to be done, and the only result will be that time has passed without you having made any progress.
complacency, n. A feeling of uncritical satisfaction with oneself or one's achievements.
Put simply, complacency is the delusion that there is currently nothing more which can be done to make one’s self, others or the world, better. Complacency is the root of all failure. When you consider yourself to be good enough, you have relinquished the most beautiful opportunity the universe provides: the opportunity to become better. This doesn’t mean you are perpetually inadequate, however. It means you are perpetually growing. You are becoming unstoppable.
Working out improves your mental fortitude.
Why? Because working out hard is just that — hard. It is the process of doing what is difficult that empowers us to pursue goals we believe will be hard to complete. When we make it a habit to not shy away from difficult goals, we get better at achieving them, not because the goals themselves have become any easier, but because a new understanding allows us to realize it will be worth it to reach these goals.
Yes, having to physically bust your ass is most certainly a downside of working out. However, it is so steeply outweighed by the feeling of invincibility you will develop, not to mention a bolstered immune system, muscle development and improved mood. When you are working out, you are actively deciding that working hard now will become worth it because of the returns it will provide later. Once you experience the benefits of working out, it becomes an addiction. Soon, the only thing you’ll perceive as hard will be going a day without working out.
When you are following a workout regimen, any given rep, by itself, has almost zero effect on your body. The man who does 101 push-ups a day will have practically nothing more to show for his effort than the man who does 100 push-ups a day. But if you follow this logic, you will never do the first push-up.
When you get into exercising, you learn to gain appreciation for the fact that although each rep has very little effect on the big picture, the sum of many individual reps can cause enormous changes over time. This simple ideology can be applied to every single thing we do in life. Deliberately focusing on bettering yourself is the most important habit to be maintained. Self-betterment is not just another task to be done with. When you begin to workout, you will discover that the mentality of always pushing yourself just a little bit harder will begin to pervade all aspects of your life. You will fulfill your potential. You will be happy. This is some Will Smith sh*t you will be on.
When you are in the middle of a lift, every part of your being is telling you to stop. Your body is shaking, you’re short of breath, and you want nothing more than to stop and lay down. What differentiates the winner from the loser is how they react to this feeling — this mental plateau, convincingly disguised as a physical one.
You are presented with two choices: put down the weights and catch your breath or keep going even though every fiber of your physical being is telling you to stop. No one besides you will know if you pushed yourself to your limits; you are doing this to prove something to yourself, not anybody else.
Every moment you are busting your ass in the gym, you are winning a battle with your mind. You are strengthening your ability to disregard the weakness inside of you which yearns for comfort instead of achievement. Adopting the mindset that there is no obstacle which cannot be overcome is the only way become an unstoppable force. The great thing about working out is that when you walk out of the gym, that mindset doesn't go anywhere.
The desire to always become better and the willpower to fulfill that desire, this is the formula for happiness, because it is the formula for making your wildest visions and dreams become real. And no feeling in the world compares to the feeling of absolute empowerment.
"Rule your mind, or it will rule you.” — Horace
Think about it.
