Over the last 3 weeks, I’ve been running a 2020 challenge to reset people’s baselines and kick off the decade with their strongest mindset to date. We have about 400 people in this specific challenge.
If you want in, join up here to get notified in the future.
The dirty little secret of these challenges is that when I host them, they tend to do was much for me as for the people taking it on.
Part of the challenge this time through is to “raise your baseline.” Since day 1, instead of allowing yourself to have “zero days” – the worst you can allow yourself to do through week 1 was “run 1 mile”, “take 1 cold shower.”
That’s the new baseline. That’s your new “zero day.”
Even if you get nothing else done, if you don’t have time for the gym or do anything extra – that’s your new baseline – 1 mile, 1 cold shower.
The baseline goes up each week, but the baseline for the challenge is just that. 1 cold shower 1 mile.
That’s a 15 minute commitment every day. 20 minutes, if you’re slow.
And while one mile doesn’t seem like much, an unbroken string of that day-after-day-no-matter-what is tougher than it sounds.
And there’s a phrase that’s been coming up that I’ve been going back to over and over and over again.
1 > 0
A mile isn’t crazy. It’s not far. It’s not particularly hard. And it will take less than 10 minutes. It’s easy to write it off as nothing. But it’s a whole lot more than just nothing. Remember, how you do anything is how you do everything.
When I talked about the on twitter, a friend mentioned that this seemed extreme. Maybe. Maybe for a lot of the US. Maybe.
But IMPOSSIBLE isn’t for the majority of the US.
And personally, for the standards for myself, if I can’t run 1 mile every day EASILY then I am severely under-indexing myself (to steal a Jesse Itzler term).
And while it might seem outlandish in a vacuum, when I step back in view of what my goals are – it doesn’t seem extreme at all. I’m not raising my ceiling or doing anything particularly incredible. All I am doing is raising the floor and expecting more out of myself.
There’s been multiple times where the time hit 11 o’clock at night and it was sub-zero temperatures and I hauled myself outside to do the run – just because. Not because I told someone else I would. Not because of some external force. But because I said I would.
Maybe I’m a procrastinator, maybe I could plan better. But no matter what comes up – it gets done.
And that’s often what a lot of things come down to. You deciding that you’re going to do it. Excuses be damned.
And now, even on my bad days – I get at least 1 mile in. Even if it’s 11:30 in a Meijer parking lot.
As a result, I don’t just look better, but I feel better about running than I have in years and it makes the challenges I have listed for this year look a lot more doable.
Whatever your goals are, remember:
1 > 0
Raise the baseline.
Get it done. #boom
Leave a Reply