Strength is rare. And society likes it like that. They want you be weak, soft, comfortable. Discomfort is seen as a disorder, an invisible fence to keep you solidly within your zone of certainty, narrowing by the second. “Don’t even bother with that. Come back to the couch, sink in and relax. You’ve had it hard, detach from discomfort and let the dopamine flow.” Until every piece of discomfort is systematically removed bit by bit. And, if ...
5 Impossible People Doing Impossible Things
Over the next few months, I want to highlight more people from the IMPOSSIBLE community doing impossible things. From the outside, people sometimes assume IMPOSSIBLE is all people who look like Joel. Or, a caricature of me. Something like a bunch of dude-bros in their 20-30s lifting weights and eating steak. Yes, all those things are awesome, but often, the people that it's the people that are nothing like me that inspire me the most and embody the ...
Miss 1? Fine, Never Miss 2
I’ve been working out wildly consistently for the past 7 months. Almost maniacally 5 days / week. Sometimes I'll take the weekend off but usually I'm doing some active rest work. I've missed a day or two here over the months, but since January, I've been remarkably consistent. The only real thing that's changed was I removed the option for not going and instituted an unofficial rule with myself. If I miss one workout, that’s fine. But I never miss ...
Don’t Ask, Don’t Get
Looking over my impossible list, I started to realize there's basically two types of things on my list that I've done: Type #1 - Things I Can Do On My Own Stuff like kitesurfing, running an ultra marathon, or starting a business. Pick something off the list, put it on the schedule, and do it. Type #2 - Stuff I Need Help For This is stuff like 777, impossible.org, and projects that are bigger than me. Type 1 tasks are easier to do. I ...
The Hard Thing About Hard Things Is The Hard Thing
I was 25 minutes into a workout titled “1-800-fuck-you” and struggling. 400 meter run. 12 lunges. 12 jumping lunges. Every 6 minutes. Each round you lose 10 seconds. At first it’s not bad, you can get through the work pretty easily. But as you get through a few rounds and drop 30 seconds - it starts to get real, real quick. I think I made it 6 rounds (40ish minutes) and change before missing the cutoff. Some badass made it 15 rounds. ...
The Obvious Thing
There’s a book “Obvious Adams” about the power of obviousness (Taylor does a good review of it here). The gist of the story is about a young man looking to start out in his career and he makes his career out of doing nothing but the obvious thing. The book is a quick read, but details "Adams'" stunning success as he goes from entry-level employee to executive - just by asking the obvious question, and doing the obvious thing. Where others would be ...
Doubters Are Better Fuel Than Haters
It’s pretty common for people to rant online about their “haters.” They fuel their identity and work around proving these ‘haters’ wrong. There’s a level of narcissism about this. Thinking that people are spending their entire day not just passively thinking about you but actively hating on you. It might be the case - but often haters ar just people making critical feedback, asking questions. They might even have a good point. If you think ...
Common ≠ Normal
One the sneaky ways society lulls you into complacency is word f*ckery. Word f*ckery Using similar words to draw you into a state of complacency and confuse you into labeling yourself a certain way. Exhibit A: Using the word “normal” and "common” interchangeably. Society pretends they’re interchangeable. They’re not. Here’s what I mean: There are plenty of issues that people deal with that are common - it has nothing to do with whether ...
Skill Theming: How to Learn More Skills, Faster
Something I’ve been thinking about lately is skill theming. Learning a bunch of related skills at once as a way to systematically get outside your comfort zone and learn a ton of new things, and Hypothesis: You learn new skills faster and gain competency by theming similar complementary skills and stacking them together than trying to learn them individually. As I was reviewing my impossible list, I saw a bunch of things on there that had been on ...
The IMPOSSIBLE Shirt Has Been Upgraded – Here’s what’s new
We just upgraded the IMPOSSIBLE Gear to be better than ever. Spoiler alert: they're awesome. Here's what's new inside: The New Impossible Gear Highlights Softer (somehow) shirts - the softest shirts in the world.Better athletic fit. Fits your body in all the right places making you look like a superhero.Clean “push your limits” down the back spine.Final touches like no-show tags and custom hang-tags.Three awesome colors: navy blue, military ...
