So You Wanna Change

Let me guess. You’re either:

1. Fat
2. Poor
3. Aimless
4. Depressed (self-diagnosed, of course, because that meme you saw was painfully relatable).
5. Operating with the concentration span of a goldfish.

If you’re here, at least four of these apply to you. I am not fat, for legal and emotional reasons. And you wanna change. No surprise there. Listen kid, change ain’t that easy. If it were that easy, everyone would “change” and suddenly change would lose all its motivational-poster value.

Let’s look at some of the things that are easy:

1. Sleeping more than 8 hours a day
2. Complaining
3. Procrastinating all day
4. Getting angry over small things

When was the last time you saw someone who slept less than six hours a day regularly and was unsuccessful? Or lay in bed all day making serious money by looking at cat pictures? Exactly.

Like I said, or more accurately, like everybody says:

Change ain’t easy

Okay, so if I were you I would be wondering, “Yeah Mr. Wise Guy, we know that. But you still don’t see us changing. Why is that?”

That is because when you finally make an effort to change, you try to change every single thing you don’t like. One day you suddenly decide to wake up at 4 A.M., meditate, study for ten hours straight, get more ripped than Zac Efron in Baywatch, go to Mars, and become emotionally stable. All at once.

See, the thing about change is that it’s something everybody wants but nobody likes. The only way you’ll change is if you take baby steps (unless, of course, your willpower was forged in the volcano of Mordor). Commit to small changes: making your bed when you wake up, meditating for five minutes before you go to bed, doing just ten push-ups every day, whatever works. You commit to one change, get comfortable, feel good about yourself, and then change a little again. It keeps piling up and voila, you are already a much better version of yourself.

This brings us to our next problem: patience. You can’t become the next Mr. Hey-Look-At-Me-I’m-Ripped in a day. It takes time, years of hard work, unless of course you decide to go the suspicious shortcut route. Don’t get disheartened if you can’t shoot five straight three-pointers after one week of practice. The most important rule, and I can’t stress it enough, is that:

He that can have patience can have what he will

-(another famous dude)

Don’t try to build Rome in a day. Make long-term plans. Like going to drum lessons every day for a year before quitting. Or sweating in the gym every day for at least a year before blaming your genes for robbing you of the mad gains you were obviously destined for. This is probably the hardest part of trying to change: committing to change long after the initial excitement has stopped clapping for you.

Peace.