Staying the course, even when you fail

It’s important to understand one very essential fact when you’re striving towards basically any goal. The most important lesson that most people forget.

New goals to be set are just as important as the ones you’ve passed, because stagnancy is the enemy of progress.

I’ve come down to 81.7kg and about 22% body fat. It’s great news for me. The problem is, I’ve realized the fact that once I get to 15% body fat, I’ll be faced with the quintessential question.

What now?

I mean I can take pictures of myself, put them on Facebook, make all the females that dumped me jealous, make my guy friends message me for tips, and keep working out to go even lower or maintain my current stats. But is that it?

The problem with staying the course, like I mentioned earlier, is motivation. Motvation to work even when you think you’re almost there, and after. Motivation to keep running. If you’ve passed the finish line, take another track and start again. At 15%, I may be in great shape, but where will I be as a human being. Is the body the only thing that should be trained?

That is why I’m planning to train my mind as well. I plan to put my brain through a rigorous regime, because the brain is a muscle too, and if you don’t exercise it, it’s going to get flaccid (not literally, this is a metaphor). I plan on learning new things. A new language, a new subject that I’ve never touched before, and probably hate. I’m going to start from the very basics and work my way up, just like I did with my body. At some point I am bound to see progress. As a human being, you never really run out of goals. There is so much knowledge out there. If you’ve been pursuing one subject like we’ve all been trained to do in life, and if you wake up one morning and say ‘You know what, I’m going to study Quantum Physics/French Literature/Political Science for the heck of it!’ no one’s going to come at you with a spear. Thanks to the internet today, knowledge is free, and it’s out there. Maybe you’ll never use what you learn, but we forget that the end goal isn’t important, the offshoots are.

In the process of learning new things, you will get new topics to make conversation about. This in turn will make you come off as a smart and interesting person. You can write articles and send them to online newsletters, start your own blog, do basically anything. I mean for the love of God even MIT has started putting up it’s lectures on an open source platform! What’s stopping you?! Go and get educated!

Education and training of the mind is just as important as training of the body. If we all train our minds a little bit every day, we might one day become a much smarter world, and see through the blanket of ignorance that politicians, world leaders, and everyone else is trying to pull over us.

As for me, I’ve decided on one foreign language and one hour of mathematics, every single day. I’m going to wake up an hour early and do half an hour of each. I may get bored, daunted, thrown down and beaten, but I’m going to keep at it till I start understanding what I’m studying. If I don’t understand a topic, I’m going to read it again, watch YouTube videos, take online tutorials, WHATEVER IT TAKES!

Hoping to tell you about some progress in my next blog.