Category Archives: Life Education

The Value of Physical Activity

Life Advice, Life Education

Physical Activity is valuable because of it’s potential to teach you life lessons on multiple levels.  For one thing, it teaches you what you can achieve when you work hard. Because fitness goals are something that can be quantifiable, you can measure your progress and see your results more easily than other goals like “I want to get better at cooking” because whether your cooking is good more subjective than whether your mile time was under 8 minutes.

The next thing it teaches you is humility because hard work does not always translate into results.  Generally people growing up with exercise experience the following:

You work an equal amount every year and as your body grows so do your skills, amplifying the effects of your work and making you think it’s because of your hard work.

As you age you get better and better until you reach your peak age of physical fitness. Then you work the exact same amount and you stop improving.  

Then you work the exact same amount and you start getting worse and worse due to age.

As a result, you can experience being better than others simply because of your age, and you can experience being worse than others simply because of your age.  Thus you learn to appreciate what you have when you have it, and you learn that not everything is inside your control: while your ability and success are related to your hard work, they are not directly correlated.

Physical Activity also teaches you patience and long term (it’s a marathon not a sprint) thinking because no matter how much you want to build your muscles and how hard you work out at the gym today, they will only grow so fast.  And if you get impatient and overwork them then you will get injured.

Injuries teach you how to handle setbacks because in life you will meet many setbacks and how you respond to them and stay the course will largely impact your success in life.  Injuries also teach you about limitations because you are limited in some respects and understanding those limitations will help you live a better life, make better decisions, and teach you how to overcome obstacles because a limitation is an obstacle, but there are often ways around it.  Perhaps you realize your limit for exercise is 2 hours a day and any more than that then you will suffer more physical pain.  Many will get stuck at this obstacle, but others will discover: it’s because I’m not resting enough after exercise, or getting enough nutrition, sleep, etc., that I have this limit, and if I improve at resting and recovery, then I can increase my capacity for exercise to 3 hours a day or more.  As such, Physical Activity teaches you how to take care of yourself, which is the first step in knowing how to take care of others.

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Life Lessons October 2014

Life Lessons

Save energy by spending when you need to — From playing tennis this month I learned that when you’re tired you should not rest or reduce the energy levels of your game even though it is the natural thing to do.  Instead you actually want to keep using energy to be aggressive and stay in control of the point because playing defensive takes more energy.  When I get tired I usually scale back on my intensity to save energy, but what I learned was that in doing so I was giving up control and having to work harder to stay in the point, and therefore having to work harder in the long run. (Specifically, I have a tendency to slack off on shots when I’m tired, giving the opponent opportunities to win and forcing me to work harder to try and save myself from loosing. Instead of being forced to use energy to try and stay alive by my opponent, I should have used that energy to hit the right shot well and prevent my opponent from having a winning opportunity.)  It is better to hit everything with good quality and lose than to hit everything poorly and be destined to eventually be worn out, exhausted, and lose, since you basically make it a matter of time before you lose when you lower the intensity of your game, showing weaknesses.  Try to end the point earlier if you’re tired is the better strategy: slacking is the wrong one.

Balance short term with long term — While it is important to make big goals and partake in long term planning, it is equally important to stay focused on the present and win in the short term.  There is no long term if you don’t win in the short term, because the short term sets you up for the first step towards your long term goals, and if you never take the first step then you can’t take the second and thus never reach your long term goal.  If you know you’re going to eat a huge buffet next month, you shouldn’t starve yourself for a month because then you’d lose in the short term and never make it to that long term goal.  If you have a long term goal, ask yourself if it has a short term component and whether you have that in your short term planning.

Appearance, reality, truth — Appearance is a 3rd person subjective point of view.  Reality is a 3rd person objective point of view.  Truth is a first person point of view.  It appears that Bob likes apples because Bob said so.  The reality is that Bob said so.  The truth is that Bob said so because he wanted to fit in, but he actually doesn’t like apples.

Stop playing the wounded or pity card: It doesn’t make sense — The logic is this: I am handicapped so even though I’m not the best at ___, I deserve the 1st place medal anyway. Does that make sense? Would you ever give an Olympic medal to someone who is incapable of competing with the best athletes in the world, simply because that person is incapable of competing and should be compensated somehow with an award that wasn’t earned?  If you’re wounded, sorry.  Life is tough and you don’t always get the best cards in your hand, but you will win what your cards deserve to win, and not what they don’t deserve to win.

Stop expecting things in return — Unless you have a contract or trustworthy agreement with the other party, when you give them something, leave it at that: that you gave them something.  A gift, not an exchange.  Then you can manage your resources/finances and ensure that you never give what you can’t bear to lose, and then you’ll live a more stress free life, and your relationships will be less strained.

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Skill is the Sum of Small Details

Context, Thoughts On Life

Many people, when they almost succeed but don’t because of a small detail, downplay the small detail’s role as a reflection of a lack of skill.  Instead, they claim to have the skills necessary to succeed but that they were unlucky.  The chance of that small detail occurring was too small to warrant preparing for, and therefore they have the skill to succeed in most cases.  

To that I say: Yes, you have the skill to achieve in most cases, but it is important to note that experienced professionals take care of the small details and can succeed in more than most cases. In fact, that’s what you pay them for, and that’s where they demonstrate their experience and skill: in their ability to handle the small details.  Anyone can follow a recipe and cook an egg, but it is in the small details of how you execute each step that a professional chef can be distinguished from an amateur cook.  To explain it another way: the more times you follow the same recipe, the more chances you have of making mistakes, and the more chances you have of gaining experience on how to correct the mistakes that you see happening.  Therefore, an experienced cook following the same recipe as an amateur cook will cook a better meal because when a “small detail” comes up, the experienced cook will know how to take care of the small detail while the amateur will not.

Therefore, if you seek to become truly skilled, it is not right to distance yourself from responsibility and place blame on the small detail.  Rather, take responsibility for the small details since they have significant enough impacts to cause you to fail.  Think about that last statement: if the detail was important enough to cause you to fail, doesn’t that make it a rather important detail and not a small one?  As such, there is no such thing as a small detail: if it impacts the outcome, it is a major detail that you over looked and should plan for and protect against in the future.   What is skill but the culmination of a bunch of small details?

This post is part of AttemptedLiving’s Life Education Curriculum, a collection of core knowledge everyone should have.  See the “Life Philosophy” section.

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