“Keep your eyes on the prize…Right?”
In my previous article (“Don’t Expect the Hollywood Ending”) I made multiple comments about how the finish line ‘isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,’ promising to expand on that concept someday. Of course, it didn’t take long to get that itch to discuss just what is so detrimental about the grand conclusion to any venture. I’ll start with this caveat— I’m aware that everything comes to an end eventually, and that seeing the fruitions of your labors can be a motivating boost of morale and continued efforts. But where so many go wrong is when the focus of any project, career, or goal is on the expected results and outcome of the process, because those expectations are going to be met with disappointment; and you’re going to wonder why you bothered working so hard to get something so underwhelming.
Last time, we talked about Tom Brady, and his hyperfocus on the current moment, giving little thought or regard to when it was time to call it quits. This time, rather than sports right off the bat, let’s delve a bit into another topic I hold close to my heart: fitness and nutrition goals. What kind of ‘finish line’ do most people fantasize about when they think about fitness? A completely “fixed” life. The snack-loving, videogaming boy who thinks if he loses X amount of weight and gets a six pack, he’ll be able to get all the girls that ignored him thus far. The girl who feels incredibly self-conscious in her current Lulu Lemon size, and knows that if she can drop Y inches off her waist, she’ll no longer wear this self-doubt. Or how about the shy, scrawny benchwarmer on the baseball team, who lacks confidence to stand up for himself, determined that if he can just gain Z lbs of muscle, he’ll get the size he needs to be the dominating presence that people see and respect? Nearly all of us have felt these insecurities—if not to those degrees— at some point in our lives, and have had our self-worth plummet in the moment, allowing ourselves to be lulled into thinking we are relatively worthless in society until we make those big changes. We hate looking in the mirror, we make every effort to hide our physical flaws, and constantly compare ourselves to literally anyone who we see as ‘superior’ to us. It’s not too difficult can see how this type of behavior can become incredibly toxic…
But as overly critical as we are on ourselves for ‘sucking in the moment’, we turn that same level of intensity toward daydreaming about how ‘awesome in the future’ we will be once we reach that goal, or the “finish line.” Let’s take the overweight gamer kid, for example. He dreams of seeing his shredded, vascular physique in the mirror, while getting admiring looks from every gorgeous girl he comes across. He yearns for that attraction and validation, and knows that everything in life will fall into place once he has that body. His potential six pack is all he can think about day in and day out…it becomes an unhealthy obsession. He doesn’t know a ton about nutrition, aside from the reality that his days of eating McDonalds twice a week, indulging in two-a-days of sodas, and splurging on candy every night are done with—This is gonna suck…but it’ll all be worth it for that six pack… Like so many others, he has no interest in enduring this radical dietary compliance for the long haul, so he looks online for the quickest, most aggressive way to get to his finish line. “How many pounds can I lose in a month?” is a commonly searched item. He sees one linked article talking about 15 pounds in 12 weeks, recommending moderate weight loss with low levels of cardio and spaced-out workouts. What? I have like 40 lbs to lose! (an arbitrary number he picks, having no clue what would actually be his ideal weight) That won’t do! So, he lets confirmation bias take over, going through websites, forums, and testimonies until he finds the answer he wants. There we go! 30 lbs in 30 days! Six pack in a month! That sounds much more efficient to him! All he needs to do is lift weights twice a day, followed by interval cardio training after each workout. The program actually even calls for a rest day on Sundays, but his six pack dreams don’t have time for resting (I’ll rest once I have the physique I need…) Notice the verbiage “need”; His current life continues to drop in value day after day of dreaming about this goal. His glorious six pack went from a desire to a necessity, and he is completely screwed if he doesn’t get it.
How about the nutrition part of the program? Well, unfortunately, the program had only generic advice on shopping healthy and meal prepping—which he had no interest in—but after looking up on Reddit to see “How little can I eat to lose weight fast?”, one of the reddit users claimed they lost 10 lbs of PURE FAT in a week by eating 1200 calories a day, and fasting entirely on Mondays! Nice! He can totally suffer through that for just a month— whatever it takes to get those abs! But since he has 40 lbs to lose, he’s gonna need to be a bit more aggressive…Maybe I’ll do 1000 calories a day…yeah, that should do the trick.
And arguably the most unfortunate part of all—the devaluing of the moment. This isn’t an ‘embrace the process’, focus on the task, accept-failure-to-learn type of journey. Negative; this is the “I’m stuck on this cross-country flight, there’s babies crying, and the person behind me keeps kicking my seat— give me a couple of drinks and an Ambien and wake me when it’s over” type of trek. This isn’t growth—he isn’t training and coaching himself to a better version of himself. Instead, he’s declaring his current self a loser, somebody he’s ashamed to be associated with, an outcast he wants to rid himself from ASAP. Then, he makes the common but critical follow-up mistake of pulling out the calendar and picking a deadline for when his new life will ‘start’– his friends’ 4th of July pool party, where he can emerge from his cocoon of suffering as the ripped hero.
I don’t need to fill in the rest of the story, do I? The question isn’t “Did he complete the program?”, but rather “How many days did he last before burning out and binging?” Not “How much weight did he lose before the party?” but “How much weight did he gain, causing him to make an excuse for why he couldn’t go?” “Did he at least learn any lessons along the way?” Sure—he learned that he “has no discipline, can’t stick to any commitments, is worthless, and will always be a fat loser, so who even cares…” In other words, that low self-esteem caused by treating his finish line as a life changing event? It dropped even further, and the idea of a happy life became an even farther reality for him to imagine. It went from a dream to a fantasy; and his life went from nothing to a nightmare.
Sound a little over-the-top dramatic? These moments of self-doubt are real. We’re our own worst critics, for better or for worse—our egos can hold some of the most self-deprecating language we hear, be it realistic or not. Another topic for another day…
But hold on a sec—what if the stars aligned? What if he had started this program a few months prior, took a more temperate calorie deficit, and followed the first, more realistic, weight loss program he stumbled across? What if this guy actually showed up at the pool party with some glorious set of abs, after spending the last few months of his life suffering through dieting that he loathed, workouts he had to drag himself through, and a life that, in his mind, sucked—but would be worth the end result? You know who would care about that six pack? Nobody. Would he turn a few heads? Absolutely. Would it be an impressive transformation that people would comment on? Undoubtedly. And would he ‘earn’ himself some dating validation out of this all? Quite possibly. Would everything else in his life—his poor communication skills, his lack of drive toward working, his inability to find a true passion in life—correct itself and “fall into place” as he predicted? Not a chance. And therein lies the most insidious issue of the focus on the finish line…
I’ve relentlessly chased finish lines of different sorts myself, and I’ve seen others do the same. Finish Line hunts of the overly theatrical extent presented above? Maybe not that severe, but conceptually? Strikingly similar—Get the management promotion, be able to finally get the income you need to live comfortably and solve all of your financial responsibility issues. Get the trophy wife/husband, allow your own individual shortcomings and feelings of inferiority to be hidden by the success/appearance of your significant other. And as our buddy in the above story finds out, once his stomach has turned from flab to a washboard? He all of a sudden expects everything to come easily to him—and when it doesn’t? Incredible frustration sets in. He’s floored by how little his life has changed. And the underlying truth sets in: All that effort…all those sacrifices…all for nothing! What a complete waste of time and energy. The finish line turns into a starting point— the start of a spiral of resentment toward the goal he spent so much time working toward. When I said “nobody” cares about his transformation, I meant it. Nobody. Not even him, when he discovers how little it truly ‘fixed’ his life.
Wow, so that’s a ton of doom and gloom, right? But hang in there, because beyond the apocalypse of worthless goal-chasing, there is an incredible silver lining in the hunt of aspirations…
Goals, achievements, and benchmarks are awesome, and fantastic motivators to utilize. However, there are two crucial caveats to your milestones: 1-They must be internally driven, and 2-They cannot be the end-all, be-all. Starting with the former—what is driving your ‘passion’ in life? There’s a lot of “fitness enthusiasts” I’ve come across who seemingly have no interest in the actual strength-building process of PRs written in their notebook, studying how different nutrition techniques and intakes can alter their body composition (this is not code for yo-yo dieting), or supplementing their lifestyle with proper sleep and recovery emphasis. Rather, these “enthusiasts” are overly concerned with everybody else seeing (and hopefully ‘liking!’) their clever angle-and-shadow effect Instagram posts. They’re interested in the quickest way to get their dream body (i.e., somebody else’s Instagram pic they’ve seen) and couldn’t care less about why or how; they just want something to follow blindly. And when it comes to supplementing their protocol with proper sleep and other crucial lifestyle elements? Psh—who needs sleep when you have C4, Jack3d, and a laundry list of fat burners/supp stacks? These types of “fitness lovers” couldn’t care less about tracking the progress; rather, they’re into hacking the process; Finding tricks, shortcuts, and work-arounds to avoid the long-term discipline and sacrifice that is the lifestyle they claim to thrive off of. In short, all they care about is the external results, and have no interest in the intrinsic motivation that carries successful people to greatness.
Let me be clear— I’ve been just as guilty of this; we all have, on all levels of the spectrum. There are students who put in minimal extra effort in college, with no real desire to learn their major field, but rather just want to get that degree so they can please future employers and get their key to a decent-paying job (This isn’t wrong, per se, but it definitely didn’t lead to me taking a ton away from my undergrad education other than a check in the box, anyway). You’ve got med and law students who slave away for years, in order to get that prestigious well-paying job—but is it out of genuine love for the field, or to appease the expectations of others (perhaps parents, or what they think money will bring their life?). How about the level of professional athletes, where you’ve got ones who legitimately love the game and want to win (LeBron James, for example—another athlete you’ll probably get sick of hearing about here), and others who are using it as a means to an end, and seemingly lose all interest and effort once they get that big payday (remember Albert Haynesworth, the NFL’s first 100 million-dollar man?). I’m not saying that an external motivator won’t get you results; but what I am saying is that those results are going to be nowhere near what you anticipate. For the college students who get that degree— again, it works, but if you were expecting this degree to make you a rock star in your field via a piece of paper, you’re going to be shocked at how entry-level your skillset is. For the begrudged doctors and lawyers out there—I may get plenty of disagreement on this, but all the money in the world means nothing if you hate your life at work. And for the athletes in the business of cashing a check and mentally checking out—you’ve got the tangible takeaway from the career, but in terms of life fulfillment from a driving purpose, team camaraderie, and emotional memories? Well, if you were Albert Haynesworth, would you be proud to tell your kids about your career highlight? Not to mention…I wouldn’t expect another payday coming your way once you’re running on empty with no more fuel to keep you motivated.
However—When you’re driven off an intrinsic desire to be your best and chase perfection, i.e. a true love for ‘the game,’ passion (growth, success, and motivation) does not become something you neglect (or are forced to fake) en route to your expected results; Rather, the results become an inherent byproduct of your passion. LeBron wants to win, sure—but he thrives off not just getting better each offseason by developing new aspects of his game, but also getting others around him to become better, too. LeBron is (in his own words) chasing a ghost— a phenomenal metaphor to this site’s concept— and in his pursuit toward the unreachable, plenty of financial, social, and championship success has come his way. For the real fitness enthusiast who lives the brand they claim—the kind you’d find making time in the gym on a Friday night, the kind who accepts that dietary and social discipline are necessary sacrifices for top performance (even slightly enjoying that bout of resistance in a masochistic sort of way), and the kind who uses their own history and progress as a benchmark, vice what they see on Instagram—those are the ones who get the results sought by so many others uninterested in the process. Which segues to the next point, #2—the finish lines you cross cannot be your End-All, Be-All. The guys and girls who obtain these lofty achievements? The results are nice, and everybody likes bit of validation every once in awhile— but they’ve got plenty of bigger aspirations ahead, so many that they’ve got barely a minute to bask in the glory of these achievements before it’s back to work on the next one. While the pretenders are out there, celebrating their achievement like the world’s ending (and subsequently wonder why nobody else is there too long to celebrate with them, leaving their high of validation soon hit with a brutal hangover), those who have alternatively have perfection as their ultimate finish line know that their journey still has a LONG way to go…And this is where this whole concept ties back to Forever Chasing Better.
Better is the goal. LeBron wasn’t satisfied with a single championship. He sure wasn’t satisfied with two or three, either. Brady has six and he’s still not satisfied. While six-pack Joe only finds satisfaction by taking mirror selfies in the gym to post on the ‘Gram, the student chasing Better realizes that he may be lean, but he’s got a ton of strength gains left on the table—he’s enthused by the challenge of reaching this same level of low body fat, but at a higher muscle mass weight. And when it comes to validation—again, we’re all guilty of indulging every now and then, to get that quick hit of approval. But the true passion-driven journeyer doesn’t fill up on whatever artificial, cheap, subjective praise may await them. They know that this food is processed, sugar-coated, fried junk—and that by loading up on it, they’re prone to get far too comfortable, complacent, and lazy. No; they blow past whatever finish line somebody else set up for them, and continue the race to their own personal finish line— the one that doesn’t exist. You’ve got to ask yourself: “What am I running for? For the lust of the end, or for the love of the race? What is the goal of my life’s journey? To be ‘done’, or to continually discover uncharted territories? Who am I doing this for? The acceptance from others, or the challenge to myself?” The Chase to Better is endless— any ‘finish line’ along the way simply ends one chapter, and begins the next. I’ll leave you with this guarantee: When shaping your life narrative, keep your eyes beyond the prize, don’t worry about the final chapter, and it’s gonna turn out to be one hell of a book.
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Forever Chasing Better 