The veteran artist mindset to your fitness lifestyle: consistent effort over peaks of effort
As Tiago Forte writes in this article on the Second Brain system:
“Stop completing your projects via “heavy lifts” – grueling slogs of painful work where you create everything from scratch. There is another way – you can slowly gather ideas, in the background and over time, using “slow burns.” Once the project gets underway, you’ll already have a rich collection of interesting ideas, insights, examples, facts, and illustrations that you can easily combine together without burning yourself out.”
The principle of slow burns vs. heavy lifts can also be applied to your lifestyle and fitness practice. In this context, “slow burns” means showing up consistently to your training sessions and reasonable nutrition regimen and merely doing so. Showing up consistently over the long term is enough for progress. That is if you value establishing a fitness lifestyle. Because the first question you may want to ask yourself is if you value fitness and physical performance in the first place.
If you do, implementing a slow-burn mindset may come more effortlessly than if you are attempting to internalize the belief that “exercise and eating healthy are good for you” only because of mimetic effects and because you can see this mania all around you in society. When it comes to habits and slow burns, establishing routines is the key. Accepting the mundanity of the activity is part of the process of creating a new routine and habit. Deriving dopamine and pleasure from the routine itself rather than from external rewards is a pivotal principle to establishing a successful habit or routine.
The way to derive dopamine and associate positive feelings with an activity is through slow burns and letting go. “Slow burns” means merely showing up over time and doing the thing, without expectations or trapping your identity into it. “Letting go” means dropping the emotional attachment to failure or success in doing an activity or achieving results through it.
Author Seth Godin often reiterates the immense value of merely doing the work, when it comes to writing or any creative endeavor. This mindset also applies to fitness and nutrition choices. You may encounter several different epochs in your journey to establishing a healthy lifestyle (i.e., one that includes consistent movement of some type and consistently balanced nutrition with a lot of vegetables, moderate/high protein, and low sugar).
The first epoch may involve novelty and high levels of motivation. This is often the case in new endeavors we pursue in life. After a few weeks, you may start transitioning into the second period, where you may begin hitting a wall of motivation and draining your willpower. The level of extrinsic motivation may keep going down from there. Over time, you will not see the same results through your new health and fitness routine as you experienced in the first few weeks or months.
That is where the mindset of merely doing the thing comes into play at its peak. Merely doing the thing is linked to identity habits. If you intend to be (or are) the kind of person who trains regularly and is an athlete, you may be more likely to stick to your training and nutrition lifestyle long-term.
Then, your training and nutrition lifestyle becomes a slow burn, as Tiago Forte may put it. Slow burns are low maintenance and high impact. They become an effortless component of your daily life and can produce a great impact on your lifestyle in the long term. If something is worth doing, it is worth doing well. And if something worth doing feels like a big lift, it may be worth merely doing it. And then repeat, once again, in perpetuity, with the same mindset of a veteran artist who does not quit.
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