Others are learning from your mistakes. They watch you, and correct themselves where you fail. Should you, then, not be doing this as well? Standing back and objectively looking at where you work and where you don’t. Then, most of all, making the necessary adjustments.
One of my favorite feelings in the whole world is the day after an intense workout. I tried out this new ab workout a few weeks ago and I spent the following four days feeling like I’d been in a fight. Every month or so I do this sprint workout I learned a long time ago where you do a 40 then a 45 then a 50 then 55, 60, 65…all the way up to a 100 yards at a dead sprint (jogging back and 10-15 seconds of rest per). I did it twice, back to back. The next day I could barely get out of bed. Literally every part of my body ached, including for some reason, my arm pits.
I have a big shipment of books coming from Amazon and I am almost giddy to get to them. To see them in a week strewn about the floor–flagged and torn apart, stained with food and a dirty cover. To crack the spine like it was a person you hated, to conquer it, to absorb it and simultaneously refuel with it.
I like that better than I do the feeling of a lazy Sunday or sleeping in (although both are fantastic). Which only leads me to further believe, as Aristotle did, that happiness is the expression of excellence. And that more than anything, good spirits depend on creating a space in which you can do something that you like as best as you possibly can.
I have so much I want to write. So much to say. So much further to run. So much more to do. So much more to learn. But I suppose that if it didn’t happen, if something happened and made all that impossible, I could shrug it off. Because yesterday, I did everything I fucking could. I was at full capacity.
I just wanted to say thanks for posting “On the Spartans and the Perfect Paper” on May 17. Your suggestion of Chuck Palahniuk’s “Chorus Line” and the outline you put on really helped me structure a paper for a class I needed a good grade in. I pulled a C on my first paper because everything was too poorly held together. The A I got this time and the “This is a strong paper…” comment I attribute to utilizing your suggestions.
I just helped someone with a paper on the rise and fall of Themistocles. I sketched out an outline just to get them started and then later in the day as I was thinking about it, I wrote almost the entire paper in my head. It’s actually a lot easier than it sounds. The outline required a Thesis, a sub-thesis for each paragraph and then a concluding realization–literally almost the entire paper. And the focus on the format, I guess, is misleading, because it doesn’t really feel that way once you get good at it. With the thesis in mind I wrote the third paragraph first, a few sentences on the second and then conclusion.
That’s how I write and how I try to work my overall strategy in life. It’s called The Commander’s Intent. What do you need to get done? [What are you trying to say] Identify the most basic and fundamental goals of the endeavor. [Thesis] And it all flows from there. The direction always dictates the details–not the other way around.