9 Comments
User's avatar
Mike Collins's avatar

Yes. Yes. Yes. I did my first 10K Spartan Trail race last month. It was freaking hard and I hated parts of it. Now today I’m starting a trail running plan and have three races scheduled. I love your wife’s mentality. F that. I’m doing it.

Kyle Layne Zibrowski's avatar

This lesson got swallowed up by the optimization and minimum-effective-dose craze. I accidentally learned something interesting about fulfillment/joy and effort from engineering school. Efficiency equals What You Want divided by What You Put In (Desires / Payment)... living life I find the most joy from situations where I aimed for low efficiency... meaning I can level down my desires or conversely become more willing to put in more effort for the same output.

It runs counter to most mainstream narratives these days, but it works, I swear.

Richard Kolkovich's avatar

Now I really want to see a video of Leah's C-Walk 🤣

Louis Cianca's avatar

This is so on target. I can personally attest to that. When my twin brother and I decided to build a model of a roman city as a fun summer project, it turned into a three year adventure. Since we had limited funds, we decided to use sugar cubes glued together with Elmer's glue. We had to figure out how to make curves, domes, columns, etc. At times I wanted to give up, as it took up so much time. But we kept at it. We ended up using 10K sugar cubes. We were so proud of our accomplishment even though it had no intrinsic value.

Tim's avatar

I love this. We actually had burgers on a CHARCOAL grill this past weekend. A lot more “work” than firing up the propane option…but the burgers seemed so much better!

Michael Easter's avatar

The charcoal smell makes grilling a peak experience.

Monique Hultner's avatar

I love this article so much!! I am so grateful that I have always, without knowing or understanding it, valued doing and accomplishing very hard (for me) things. I try to instill this in my kids, as well.

Scott Hooten's avatar

Not sure if this completely fits here but my Tai Chi push hands instructor (Herman Kauz) used to charge us $5 cash each for each session. He told us that he would happily do it for free but most of us would not value it and the likelihood of anyone "pushing" on was very low.