The Fitness Adviser

A few years ago, I read a book by Timothy Ferris titled The 4-Hour Workweek. I found that most of what I read in it was for entertainment value only, and only applicable to someone who wanted to stay single for their entire lives. That being said, there was one piece of advice in there that I really liked. Always aim for the exceptional. The reasoning?

[Aiming for the exceptional actually makes it easier to accomplish your goals because you're more motivated to achieve them.]

When you’re trying to accomplish or attain something that’s amazing, you’ll be so motivated and pumped up about accomplishing it that you’re more likely to accomplish it than if you were trying to do something mediocre. This really resonated with me, and I felt that the idea of not striving for mediocrity is some of the best advice I’ve heard. Here’s how you can apply this concept in the best way possible, starting today, to both fitness and to life:

Set Goals That Are Seemingly Unattainable

Conventional wisdom says to set modest goals that you know you can achieve. Rafi Bar-Lev wisdom says you have no idea just how great your potential is in accomplishing the unbelievable. If Helen Keller was able to be a prolific author despite being both deaf and blind in the 1800’s and if Jonas Salk could invent a vaccine to eradicate Polio from the world, then you can accomplish anything.

Instead of aiming for 10 push ups, aim for 100 within a year. Instead of trying to lose 10 pounds, go for losing all of the weight you have to lose. The important thing is to set extreme goals, and then get motivated and excited about reaching them. You’ll find that striving for the seemingly impossible to reach goals is way more fun than going for modest ones.

Have Confidence in Yourself

To accomplish the extraordinary, you need self confidence. This happens to be a catch 22, since to have self confidence you need to already have accomplished things in the past. My advice? In the beginning, fake the self confidence and keep telling yourself that you’re the best at what you’re doing, even if you don’t really believe it. As you accomplish smaller goals on your way to your bigger goal, you’ll begin to naturally achieve genuine self confidence.

Don’t Underestimate How Good Your Cards Are

Here in Israel, we have a saying. In Hebrew, it’s “Zeh masheyesh veim zeh nenazech”. In English, that’s translated to “This is what we have, and with this we will be victorious”. The idea is that you don’t complain about the odds, and you succeed with whatever tools you have at your disposal.

Never allow yourself to blame circumstance for not allowing you to be exceptional, even if you’re justified in doing so. Remember that just by virtue of being able to read this article, you have an advantage over a large segment of the world’s population just by being literate and having all the world’s knowledge open to you through reading.

Even though it may sometimes seem like all you have is a bunch of single cards with no doubles or triples, if you look a little more closely at your hand, you may find out that you’re holding a royal flush…

There You Have It…

There you have it. Now you know why it’s so important to aim for exceptional goals. Life is just too short to strive for mediocrity.

Do you agree with me that the best way to go about achieving goals is to aim for the exceptional? Leave a comment and let me know!

This entry was posted on Friday, August 21st, 2009 at 6:35 pm and is filed under Motivation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.