Dear friend, a thought on my mind; perhaps the best way to approach life is to consider our life goals, and also for us to become more critical and discerning on how to achieve those life goals.
For example, our creative life goals, and also, what we want to achieve in a single day, in a week, or our lifetimes.
1. Mastering your physiology
I just hit the legendary 975 pound atlas lift, powered by ERIC KIM OMAKASE COFFEE, and a realization for myself:
I have a passion and a lust for ever more.
For example, it seems at least for myself, the direction and path I desire is to always have higher numbers.
For example, when I consider my younger days when I was 16 years old, and I had my 1991 Sentra SE-R, 5 speed coupe, and the joy that I had was always changing the modifications and things on it, do you ever give it more horsepower, torque, improve performance, etc.
However, I was never interested in comparing my car with other people. In fact, I had deep pride in my car, and how unique it was. The Sentra SE-R, the B 13, a unique model built from 1991 to 1993, was practically unheard of, even when I was a teenager. Similar to performance to an old-school BMW M3, and superior performance to the Honda Civic SI, which was also very popular when I was a teenager.
It seems that nowadays, at least in cars and car culture, we are obsessed with having more horsepower, more performance points, etc. It seems that the traditional benchmark in holidays is to have the Tesla model S plaid, 1000+ horsepower etc. I think this is what drives us, both metaphorically and literally, for example the dodge hellcat, SRT, dodge challengers etc., everyone wants to have the mythical 1000+ horsepower. But a funnier life goal and path:
Maybe a better life goal is instead, to desire to lift 1000 pounds.
I am fairly certain that I should be able to atlas lift over 1000 pounds, within the next year or two. I find this to be an interesting pursuit, because the only things I require is courage and time. The courage to attempt it, and time.
Also, focus. I think focus is a critical part of the equation, as the criticality of focus is that before you attempt a certain lift, when you load up over 10 plates on the bar, you gotta focus. You must focus to channel all of your energy, guts, courage, chutzpah into that one single given moment.
Why? Several things. First and foremost, you must focus and hype yourself up in order to have the courage to even attempt it in the first place.
Second, you want to be successful. The courage necessary for the attempt is critical, but technically the desired outcome is to be successful. To succeed.
Truth be told I don’t really care for “failure“, that is not being successful. If I try a given day give it my all, even if I had supreme focus and I was not successful, it doesn’t bother me that much. I’ll just try again in a few days, in a week, and if I have a long enough runway, I know I will eventually be successful.
2. Time
The reason why I believe time to be a critical component is at least in the context of weightlifting, if you attempt a one rep max, consistently, at least once a week, every week, let’s say for 10 years straight, certainly you’ll get stronger in the long term.
Are having a more long-term vision towards the future is a good one. Why?
I’ll give you an example. This summer me Cindy and Seneca spent about a month and a half in Asia, about two weeks in Hadong South Korea, and about a month in Saigon Vietnam. Because I did not have my typical gym, I noticed that my strength went down a little bit, or at least my technique and familiarity went down a little bit. But ultimately in the long term vision of things, I was not really affected. Actually, within about a week of coming back, or two weeks of coming back, I’ve been able to hit greater personal records than I had before I left to Asia. For example my rack pull, before leaving I was able to do eight plates, 25, five, and a 2.5’er. But a few days ago, I was able to supersede that old personal record, by doing a plate and a 35, 845 pounds. Therefore, even though I was gone from the gym for about a month and a half, I was able to achieve a new personal record that was 5 pounds greater than I was before my trip.
Also my atlas lift. 970 pounds was my new personal record before my trip, and after my trip, I was a little bit concerned if I lost too much strength and chutzpah. But even though I am still jetlagged, and I am sure that my strength waned a bit, I’ll be able to hit a new personal record of 975 pounds. That is 5 pounds more than it was before!
Therefore my big suggestion life is this; maybe in terms of vision, it is good to think at the three month, six month, year, 1-3 year, five year, 10 year, 20-30 year spans.
For example, I remember after I graduated UCLA, and I was living in West LA, and there was a tiny Tesla showroom dealership in the area. This is when Tesla was still just the rebranded lotus car. This is one there was only a Tesla roadster. I think Tesla was already in Public at the time.
I think the genius of Elon musk, Jeff Bezos, etc. is that their vision encapsulates very long periods of time.
For example, SpaceX. Or thinking about colonizing space and mars. Certainly we have to think at the decade, 20 year, 30 year, 40 year time span. To think short periods of time is not useful.
I think the reason why I enjoyed reading Invent and Wander by Jeff Bezos so much, which is just a collection of his shareholder letters is that it is clear that Jeff Bezos had at least a 30 year vision. For example with Amazon prime, it was seen as pure insanity. Now we just take it as an expected thing. Fortunately for myself, I still see Amazon prime as pure magic and phenomenal. The same thing goes with Uber, etc.