Hyper Convenience
Over the course of my life, everything has gotten faster. Deliveries went from weeks to days to hours. TV shows drop the whole season instead of once a week. Music downloads went from crashing your whole computer with Limewire to having million of songs available instantly.
Convenience is great for some things. I’m grateful to have access to food, air conditioning, running water, and electricity. Our necessities today weren’t easy to come by for most of human history.
I’d argue there’s many more downsides to our hyper-convenient world. Obesity is out of control. Social media addiction will add up to people spending years, maybe even decades, of their life staring at a 6 inch screen. Debt has continued to climb and is normalized to the point where people can’t handle even an unexpected $1,000 emergency.
I saw a commercial the other day advertising faster working GLP1’s. I’ve heard of Ozempic before, but I didn’t know how massive the market was for weight loss drugs. 15 million people are on active prescriptions. We’ve gotten to the point where we’re not only promising pills will help you lose weight, but now creating new pills to do it faster.
We’ve forgotten that things take time. Reaching our goals won't happen overnight. If they did, we’d have nothing to strive for. There’s no pills or quick fixes that will get you lasting results. Instead of looking for the shortcut, we should embrace the process and let things flow naturally.
When I’m struggling to write, it’s usually because I’m not giving myself adequate time to sit with an idea. I’m not spending days honing something in, making edits, or trying to come up with a clearer way to get my point across. Instead, I’ll try to rush the process. It leads to more frustration and worse writer’s block than if I just spent a little bit of time each morning being focused.
A Mindset Shift I’ve had recently
Last week on the podcast, I spoke with 77kg weightlifter Darci Molina. She described going through a really tough stretch of training where her technique was going backwards and progress stalled. She talked about learning to embrace those days and turning the page every time she had a bad day in the gym. Each time she walked in again for training, it was a fresh opportunity for things to click. If it didn’t happen that day, she’d bring the same mindset to the next session. Maybe this will be the day things get better.
Since Nationals in 2024, I’ve been in a pretty rough headspace with weightlifting. My technique was getting worse, nagging injuries were getting aggravated more frequently, and it felt like I was never going to get back to my best numbers from four years ago.
I’ve stopped thinking about getting back to my best. I’ve shifted to thinking that today is the day my technique is going to feel better and I’ll feel stronger. If I miss a lift or things feel off, I work on visualizing the next rep to feel how I want. I’m back to focusing on progress over the weight on the bar. While the big numbers aren’t there quite yet, I’d consider this the best two weeks of training I’ve had in the past year.
Closing Thoughts
Where do you look for shortcuts? It might be overlying on ChatGPT or quitting something that’s taking you longer to get better than expected. We don’t need quick fixes. We need to let things happen the way they’re supposed to happen.