“Focus on your likes, not your wants.

• You may not want to exercise, but you like how it makes you feel

• You may not want to write, but you like the feeling of accomplishment

• You may not want to wake up early, but you like the calm beauty of the morning

Wanting is the desire you feel before doing something. Liking is the satisfaction you feel after doing something. Let your likes guide you.” - James Clear

There is not much else to be said here to kick our week off. I love the way James Clear articulates habit and self-improvement. Focus on the likes this week, not the wants.

Brain - Write A Letter To Your Future Self

Where do you want to be in five years? I am sure you have had general thoughts about where you want to be in the future, as we are always working on things in our lives that progress towards things we want to achieve, type of person we want to be, the relationships we want to have, etc. But – have you ever sat down and had a detailed thought session around exactly what you want this to look like?

Ari Wallach was on The Huberman Lab Podcast this week and suggested an idea I think everyone could benefit from doing – write a letter to your future self (in particular, yourself in 5 years).

“The change occurs not when you receive the letter, but when you actually write it. You’re actually thinking about future you in a way that you normally don’t. Who is going to receive this letter, who do I want them to be, what does that arc look like that I want to connect to?”

What does the letter include? “Dear ____” and then whatever you want to achieve.

• What are your hopes?

• What are your dreams?

• What are you afraid of? What would it look like if your future self overcame those things?

• What do you want to see happen?

• How do you want your family life to be?

• Where do you want to be professionally?

•  What does your health look like?

Putting these specific details down helps begin the process of setting a roadmap to how you will get there. We of course have generic ideas of where we want to be in the future – what we want our bodies to look like, goals to achieve financially, the basic structure of our home life, etc. These are all great places to start. But if you really want to achieve a specific vision for yourself that encompasses all of the buckets that you care about, this letter can be a catalyst for that forward progress.

See the end of the Superset for a tool that you can utilize for similar activity to this concept –

Body - 5 Things I Wish I Knew When I Started Lifting

I see these types of videos and posts all over the place, and to be honest, they typically aren’t my favorite. “10 things I would have done differently in ____”. It can be dismissive to the idea that what you have done and been through to this point has in a way shaped you into the person you are today.

In the concept of lifting though, one of the things I think often about is how much further and productive my training has become year over year, simply through repetition and an increase of quality information.

I started seriously lifting in 2013, a little over a decade ago. I started to become obsessed with learning about fitness and the gym only a few years later. I would give anything to be able to start back at square one with the knowledge I have today. Which leads to this - 5 things I wish I knew when I started – also 5 things I use as foundational pieces of my regimen today.

1. Leave your ego at the door: There is nothing less important in the gym than the weight you are lifting. Everyone wants to be the strong guy in the gym, but when you leave the gym, absolutely no one can tell that you can bench exactly 345 pounds. Instead, spend your mental energy on how you lift the weight, not how much weight you lift. Start your sets with light to no weight and feel exactly how you want the movement to progress. What muscle are you working? Can you feel that you are targeting it specifically? Can you comfortably get the reps you are trying to get? Can you control the weight on the way down for 2 – 3 seconds? Focusing on how you lift the weight will exponentially improvement how your physique develops. Find a source you trust online and learn HOW to do the lift.

2. Warm Up Properly: I have been the worst at this in previous periods of my life. Roll into the gym, do a few arm circles, behind the head triceps stretch, bend over and touch the toes, and roll. As I have gotten a little older, the hardest times I have had mentally are the times when I have had to work around a slight ailment that was likely caused by being a dumb ass and not warming up the muscles before I hop into it. We aren’t in a rush, this is a long game. Spend 5 – 10 minutes before the lifting stretching properly and getting the heart rate up a bit.

3. Strive for Symmetry: The foundation of a healthy body is having equal proportions. I could include an endless list of “skipping leg day” memes, but in all seriousness, your fitness plan must have balance to it. If you are training upper body parts for 2 days, ensure the 3^rd day is a lower body focus. This can be weights, or it can be a longer cardio session with some bodyweight movements, but don’t skip it. You will be sore lifting legs for a few weeks, really probably every time after you hit them properly, but the benefits of a strong lower body are endless.

4. Allocate Your Energy Properly: One thing I am focusing a lot on at the current moment is how I structure my workouts. In particular, based on research and experience, I have begun to ensure that the first lift of each day is the heaviest, compound movement of the day. For chest, that is some sort of barbell bench press. For back, that is some sort of deadlift or lat pulldown. For legs, that is some sort of squat or heavy pressing movement, etc. Utilizing your max energy at the beginning of the lift ensures we are progressing strength, where we can hit some of the supporting movements after the body is a little more taxed.

5. You Can’t Outwork a Shit Diet: So much of the focus goes into the gym – it’s the fun part. The part where you get instant feedback. Lift hard, get some pumped muscles, and see yourself changing in the mirror. Make no mistake about it though – you can’t outwork a bad diet. If you needed to lose 50 pounds and had the option to do 1 or the other – dial your diet, or go hard in the gym with an average diet, I would recommend the diet-only route 10/10 times. The diet gives you the energy to lift, it gives your body the ability to change, through caloric surpluses and deficits, and as the main goal tends to be fat loss – it doesn’t matter how much you work out if you are overeating. Period.

I could write on things like this for hours, but I am trying to remind myself that some of the things I view as standard information these days are not standard in the general population, it’s standard because of the time I have been able to spend figuring it out. Learn from some of the mistakes I have made along the way

Book - The Prescription Is Reading

I listened to an interesting podcast this week that discussed some of the real, scientific benefits of reading, and I thought they were worth opening up into a larger conversation for this week’s letter.

So many of us look at reading as something we don’t love, so the act of sitting down with a book seems more like a chore than leisure. My hope this week is to help you reconfigure the way you view your WHY for reading. A couple of bullets how:

• Stressed Out? Read! - According to a 2009 study conducted at Sussex University, reading reduces your stress levels by up to 68%, on as little as 6 minutes of reading a day. The practice of reading requires the engagement of the same parts of your brain that respond to the external factors that you are stressed about. In layman’s terms, it’s difficult for the brain to do both. Dive into a book to calm down your anxious thoughts

• Strengthen Your Brain – We prescribe a bench press to build the chest, a running plan for cardiovascular fitness, but what do we prescribe for the brain? What are we doing besides living that is actively improving the cognitive ability we possess? Research out of Boston Children’s Hospital showed that reading can rewire your brain, create new neural networks, and strengthen the white matter in the corpus callosum, which enhances communication between the two brain hemispheres. This allows you to process information more efficiently, helping you learn faster.

• Improve Creativity – Reading exposes you to ideas, topics, and stories that you might not have come across in other forms of entertainment. Reading a biography about someone who endured a more difficult time period, a CEO who started a business, a fantasy book about an imagined land – simply put, you expose your brain to ideas from others, which allows your brain to expand its horizon of what is and isn’t possible

• Can’t Focus? Read! – We live in a microwave society of thousands of stimuli at the same time. If you don’t read, chances are you’ve used the excuse “I can’t focus for long enough!” You should take that personally and as a slight against yourself. Reading forces you to work on the ability to focus on the page, consciously digest the information, and block out other thoughts. This is a skill you will improve over time, but you have to start

The role model you want to be like is reading, I guarantee it. If that’s not enough to convince you to start, give yourself a task from the above list of a symptom you want to address, and prescribe yourself reading to do so.