It was earlier in his life, perhaps when he worked in finance, that Dave Spitz picked up a belief:
“If you do everything on your to-do list, you’re succeeding. If you don’t, you’re failing.”
Dave quit finance and eventually started California Strength, a training facility for Olympic weightlifting.
While he owns a gym, he doesn’t actually get to work out all the time. Things get busy. So he had to shift this belief into something new. He told himself:
“You don’t always have to do everything. You just never do nothing.”
When Dave doesn’t follow his plan, he doesn’t feel like he’s failed. As long as he gets in his 10,000 steps per day, stands for 12 hours per day, and lifts heavy things a handful of times a week, avoids processed foods, and maintains a balanced diet of proteins, fruits, vegetables, that’s success.
This is a really great motto. I found it through Juliet and Kelly Starrett’s book, Built to Move, in which they suggest their own exercise for showing up every day during a particularly busy part of their lives. They called it The 10s: 10 pull-ups, 10 push ups, and 10 squats at 10p.m., on repeat for 10 minutes.
“It wasn’t high caliber, but it helped us retain our strength and kept us fit enough so that when we did resume some of our sports and gym activities, we were still in decent shape,” they write. The exercise might not have been their best workouts ever—not even close!—but it enabled them to maintain their physique.
Letting go of this preciousness can be really valuable. A light workout is much better than no workout at all—or a perfect workout that only happens in your imagination.
“Lowering the bar is the first step for most of us super competitive people who have all of these other things going on,” Dave says to Juliet and Kelly.
Whatever your primary focus is in your life, never do nothing about it. Days with zero progress are killers. As Tyler Cowen writes, “Few academics fail from not getting enough done each day. Many fail from living many days with zero output.”
P.S., This blog is a great way for me to practice never doing nothing. 0.1 progress is a world of difference from 0. As my friend Nik writes (about me and this blog!), “A writer who can maintain a daily blog through the chaotic storm that everyday life can be is a much stronger writer than someone who only types when they feel like they have the time for it — and whenever their art takes center stage again, they’ll come back swinging.”
Thanks to Rohan Rajiv who recommended this book. I’ve only spent a short amount of time with it, and the exercises I’ve tried made my body feel much better.